Rob Zombie raped my childhood...

Seriously... I just finished watching the recently-distributed work print of the "Halloween" remake, and man, what a piece of shit. You want reasons?

1) The completely arbitrary score, which goes from Carpenter's iconic original to some industrial Fear Factory crap with no sense of rhyme or reason. Along with this, the soundtrack is a constant anachronism, reminding you that-- just like in "The Devil's Rejects"-- Zombie believes any scene with "Freebird" playing in the background qualifies as art. The characters reflect this, too; for a movie set in the present day (or so I've gathered), it surprised me that you could insert any cast member into "Dazed and Confused" and they wouldn't seem out of place.

2) Mike Meyers as Frankenstein... bad idea. First, they hire some 7'3" WWF reject to play the character, making me think for a second that I was watching the sequel to the Kane-starring vehicle "See No Evil". Then, they decide to make the killer all emo; the last scene, where of course we're meant to have sympathy for the poor guy as Malcolm McDowell (as Dr. Loomis) delivers the most hackneyed "I know there's still a human in there" speech ever, is laughable.

3) The Slipknot masks... fuck that. I know I'm out of America right now, but as a nation, aren't we past that at this stage? (Don't answer that. I might never come back if you do.)

4) The fact that Zombie spends the first 1/3 of the movie focusing on Michael Meyer's back-story... if you've seen any movie ever, you'll know the score: widowed mother living in poverty with an alcoholic boyfriend, bullies pushing him around in school, slutty older sister, and so on. By doing this, he needs to break the rest of the movie down into Cliffs Notes form. Not that the original is some sort of epic, but there's a lot of tension that builds throughout; here, any actual scene of "horror" is disposed of in a quick 10 second slash. Where I'd say that the original was--when I saw it as a child--one of the most intense films I had seen, this one had no build-up whatsoever.

5) Malcolm McDowell... worst performance ever. The corpse of Donald Pleasance would have done better.

6) Danielle Harris naked... I was hoping for better, and what's a 30 year-old doing playing a high schooler anyways?

7) Besides Meyers, none of the other characters in the film are fleshed out at all (and really, I always thought the strength of Michael Meyers in the first film was his characterless-ness-- the constant references to "The Bogeyman", the blank stare of the mask, the fact that his character doesn't speak a word through the whole running time). One thing even people who hate "Halloween" would have to acknowledge is that Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Stroud is one of the most empathetic scream queens ever, and here, it's just another converted WB performer or something.

It could go on for longer, but I'll stop there.

I got back from Japan a few days ago. I managed to see Fukuoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Himeji, and Tokyo, and somehow I'm going to have to finish reporting on my China trip from several months ago before I get to talking about it. I'm not promising anything.