GARBAGE is a recurring feature wherein we examine the worst of the worst of bad movies.

Rob Zombie (real name Zombini — he changed it when he got to Hollywood), is a musician who sings songs about skeletons and strippers, and occasionally he dabbles in moving pictures. Zombie actually has a keen visual eye, and when he’s allowed to play around in his own world (see The Devil’s Rejects), the results can be successful. However, when you give Mr. Zombie an already established property to work with, watch out, because here comes the pain.

For, you see, while Bob Zomb knows how and where to put a camera, he can’t write a screenplay to save his life. Rob Zombie creates a very specific type of character for his films: the foul-mouthed redneck. Everyone in Zombie World is a redneck who is constantly screaming f-bombs, wearing tank tops, and threatening to “skull-fuck” people in front of relatives. In the right context this can work (see again The Devil’s Rejects). However, in the world of Halloween, this is so inappropriate and flat-out terrible it’s like hearing a big wet fart during your parents’ joint funeral.

Don’t get me wrong: the Halloween franchise is not exactly sacred. Aside from John Carpenter’s original, the many sequels went on a various decline until they hit rock bottom — rock bottom being Halloween: Resurrection, which featured a found footage angle (ugh) and Busta Rhymes doing kung-fu and saying, “Trick or treat, mutha fucka!” (double ugh).

After Halloween: Busta Rhymes, we all thought the Halloween franchise couldn’t get any worse.

We were wrong. DEAD WRONG.

At first, Halloween ’07 sets out to try something different: tell the story of Michael Myers’ youth. For those of you who don’t know the story, let me enlighten you, you clueless wonders! In the Carpenter original, Michael Myers is an unstoppable force of evil. Even as a young toe-headed lad, he had no human emotions, and he brutally murdered his sister on Halloween night. Michael’s psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence in the original) tries to convince everyone that Michael is not a human being, that he’s just pure evil, and everyone says, “Oh, Loomis, you so silly!” But it turns out Loomis is right, and 15 years later Michael breaks out of a mental institute, dons a Halloween mask, and goes on a killing spree in his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois. Carpenter’s original is a tight, unrelenting masterpiece of horror. It’s a film that Roger Ebert, in his 1979 review, described as “a visceral experience—we aren’t seeing the movie, we’re having it happen to us. It’s frightening. Maybe you don’t like movies that are really scary: Then don’t see this one.”

So right off the bat you might think, oh, this Zombie version might be pretty neat and scary. Because in the original film, Michael’s family is more or less normal, and yet they inadvertently raise a son who is unrelentingly evil. How creepy would THAT movie be? Seeing Michael’s normal suburban parents trying to deal with the fact that their very young son is a homicidal maniac…I get chills just thinking about that.

Rob Zombie, however, is not interested in a visceral experience. Instead of taking the groundwork Carpenter laid in the original, Mr. Zombo said, “You know what would be COOL? If Michael Myers were just this like, fat kid, and, uh, his ENTIRE family were hillbillies, even though they lived in suburban Illinois. Oh, and uh, I dunno, he likes KISS or something? Where’s my check?”

The first half of Rob Zombie’s Halloween shows us that young Mikey Myers grew up in a house so vile and damaging that it would be shocking if he didn’t turn out to be a mask-wearing psycho killer. Myers’ mom (played by Zombie’s wife, frequent muse, and terrible actress Sheri Moon Zombie) is a stripper, his stepfather (William Forsythe) is a crippled asshole who threatens to do the aforementioned “skull-fucking” at the breakfast table, and his sister (Hanna Hall) likes to sleep around with many boys and parade around the kitchen in her underwear. Worst of all, she does NOT take Michael trick-or-treating!

We see that Michael is a damaged youth, killing animals and getting in trouble at school. He comes to the attention of school psychiatrist Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell, dolled up in groovy attire complete with fake sideburns). Loomis is troubled that Michael is so troubled, and we the audience are troubled because we are NOT off to a great start. Right from the first scene of this film, with Michael and his angry family, I felt myself shrinking in my theater seat, the way I feel when I’m seeing a really bad comedian bomb on stage; I just wanted to look away.

Michael ends up beating a bully to death with a large tree branch, and I’ll give Zombie props for this scene, as it’s probably the only effective scene in the film. It’s shot in a disturbing, jarring way, which doesn’t celebrate the kill but rather points out how upsetting this is; this is a kid beating another kid to death, violently. If Zombie had pulled off more scenes like this in the film he might actually have something unique on his hands, but instead he said, “Nahh,” and got back to all the bullshit.

Soon it’s Halloween night, and young Mike just wants to go trick-and-or-treating. His mother can’t take him, because she has to strip that night. And his stepfather can’t because he is awful and also has broken legs or something. It’s up to Mike’s slutty sister, who of course blows off trick-or-treating so she can blow some guy. The guy happens to have the famous Michael Myers mask with him, because this is what passes for mythology building in Zombie’s world.

After a painfully hilarious scene where Michael, feeling dejected and alone, sits down on the curb while “LOVE HURTS” begins to play (cutting back and forth between frowning Mike and his mother, stripping), Michael says, “Whatever,” and becomes a mass murderer. Just like that. Michael puts on the Shape mask, which looks hilarious, because the mask is huge and he’s a boy, so it gives him a bobble head appearance. And then he kills everyone in the house, with one exception: he has a baby sister whom he calls “Boo,” because, get it, Halloween, ghosts, boo, ha ha ha KILL ME. Anyway, he lets Boo live, because I guess she’s innocent and pure because she’s a baby or something like that. Michael’s mother comes home from a hard night of flashing her cans and is horrified to find her terrible trash family has been murdered.

But she must not have loved them that much because she’s still very lovey-dovey with Michael, and visits him in the asylum and hugs him and stuff like that. It’s touching. No it isn’t, I’m lying, it’s boring and terribly acted. Loomis is there too, because I guess he can work wherever he wants. He tries at first to help Michael get better, and I’m pretty sure he’s flirting with Michael’s mother, which is just creepy. But Michael does not get better. Instead he grows up to be a gigantic hulking wrestler, played by Tyler Mane. And because Rob Zombie has long greasy hair, his Michael Myers has long greasy hair too. Somewhere along the line, Michael’s mother blows her head off because she can’t stand being in this movie, and we all envy her as she goes down to hell to play blackjack with Satan (which is what I guess happens in hell; I’m not really sure? Let’s all go there and see — it’ll be better than watching this movie, I assure you).

As a grown-up, Michael is cared for by Danny Trejo, playing himself. You see, in all movies, Danny Trejo is just playing Danny Trejo as he gets a new job. It’s sort of like how the Marvel movies share the same characters and actors across different stories. Danny Trejo’s entire career is just one huge crossover movie franchise, where he is always playing himself. Trejo’s job in this movie is a kind hospital orderly who treats Michael with human decency. Everyone else at this hospital, though, treats him like dog shit, because that’s exactly what trained psychiatric hospital staff act like: they constantly make fun of and berate their patients, especially if their patients are gigantic murders with the strength of elephants.

Halloween night rolls around, and these sensitive hospital orderlies begin the night by saying, “What cuckoo are we moving tonight?” “Michael…Myers,” someone says. “Trick or treat, baby!” cries the orderly who initiated this conversation (played by Bill Moseley), because this is a good movie. Of course, there’s no real explanation of why they’re moving Michael Myers on this night. They just are, because Rob Zombie remembered that happened in the original movie and he realized he needed to put it in here. (I should note that in the Director’s Cut of the film, the scene plays out differently, with more vileness: two of these sensitive orderlies are raping a female inmate, and Michael kills them and escapes. Rob Zombie: filmmaker!) Michael also kills his BFF Danny Trejo as he escapes, because no one is safe. Trejo’s death scene is drawn out and hilarious, as he is drowned (!) by Myers, and every time Myers brings his head out of the water for air, Trejo coughs, “I was good to you, Mikey!” Then blood starts coming out of his mouth, because I guess that happens when you’re drowning. And then Michael smashes a TV onto Trejo’s head, because this is a Rob Zombie movie, where overkill is king.

Michael escapes and we finally find out how he got his jumpsuit, because Rob Zombie feels like we needed to see that. Are you ready for this shocking big new reveal in Halloween history? Here it is: a truck driver named Big Joe Grizzly (Ken Foree, of the original Dawn of the Dead) is taking a shit somewhere, and Michael kills him and takes his jumpsuit. There, that’s it. Why is this scene in the movie? It’s here because Rob Zombie, for nostalgia reasons, wants to fill his films up with the B-movie horror actors of his youth. Which is kind of cute but also gets distracting. Almost every adult role in this film is populated by some B-movie horror star, to the point where it feels like you’re wandering through a convention center during the latest Monster Mania, spending fifty dollars to buy a Movie Maniacs action figure.

It’s here where Zombie completely switches gears and the film becomes an almost scene-for-scene remake of the original Halloween. We meet Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton, who is ATROCIOUS), and her friends. They’re all giggly high school girls who constantly call each other “bitch” and make lewd gay jokes. Hilarious! In the first film, the character of Laurie Strode carried the film; she was one of the original Final Girls, and you really cared what happened to her and by extension her friends. In Zombie’s film, his teen girl characters act like every other character in the film; that is, they act like awful rednecks, so you really can’t wait for Michael Myers to stab their faces off.

Michael comes back to Haddonfield, grabs his old mask, and goes on the hunt. You see, Laurie is the grown up Boo, his baby sister, and now Michael wants to kill her. So what begins is a completely ludicrous sequence where Michael Myers turns into a private detective, and walks around town threatening people, but before he kills them, he holds up a PHOTO OF HIS SISTER, as if to say, “Have you seen this girl?” It’s so stupid that I’m tempted to turn this bullshit off here and now, but there’s only like ten minutes left, so if we’ve come this far why not see it through to the bloody end?

The last act of the film pretty much condenses Carpenter’s entire original movie into thirty rushed minutes. Loomis comes looking for Michael, Michael kills all of Laurie’s friends, and the film dares you to give a damn. Eventually Loomis sort of rescues Laurie, but then Michael smashes a car windshield, and Loomis, I swear to GOD, yells out, “Michael, what the hell?!” as if he too were fed up with all this stupidity.

Eventually the film mercifully comes to an end, and leaves you with a crappy taste in your mouth, as if you had been slurping actual feces through a straw for two hours. And to make it worse Zombie didn’t stop there: he actually made a sequel to this nonsense (which is also terrible, but slightly better than this movie, if you can believe that).

As bad as this film is, it does have its defenders. Everyone is, of course, entitled to his or her opinion, and far be it for me to judge you if you like Rob Zombie’s Halloween and say you’re wrong for liking it. But let me just say this: if you like Rob Zombie’s Halloween, you are a bad person and you should feel bad about yourself. Also you are wrong.

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