A huge thanks to Lori Bowen for joining us on this episode. Follow her on Twitter and check out her awesome blog.
Lori's music videos:
Lori's short films:
- Aftershock
- Without/Within
- A Hammer Fell in Jerusalem: Anathema
- A Hammer Fell in Jerusalem: and be at rest
- JustUs (coming soon - trailer)
This episode discusses Halloween (2007). IMDb. Wikipedia.
I watched both of these films back to back about a year or so ago. It was my first time with both, and I was surprised at how effective Carpenter's Halloween was. It was simple, and made the most of its limited budget. Michael was an enigma, and he did what he did and the whys are left to the viewer.
ReplyDeleteThat said I think Zombie's Halloween isn't terrible, and really the first half is quite good. I liked this twisted story of a young boy caught in a whirlpool as he spirals more and more away from innocence and sinks and loses himself into the void. It's not perfect, and yeah Zombie over does the white-trash asthetic way too much, but it works mostly. It's not a very good Halloween film, but on its own it stands up pretty good. The problem is the second half, which does try to be more of a Halloween film and instead just comes off as warmed up leftovers. There's some nice bits here and there, but it ultimately felt like a retread of your standard slasher film. Again, not terrible, but if Zombie wanted this to be a true reimagining he should have kept with the first half and just told a new story and really broke new ground or better yet just made this an orignal property and shaved off all the Halloween bits. We might have gotten something really great, instead we got something ok.
Still, Zombie's Halloween is better than most of recent batch of Platinum Dunes remakes.