Horror Off-Season: Oculus

At this point, there's no denying that I love Mike Flanagan (See exhibits A, and 2).  However, I was a bit anxious of what he'd do when partnered with a studio and given a budget.  Would the studio stomp on his Flanagan-ness?  Would he go crazy with the money and throw in a bunch of pointless effects?  Would telling an old story again make him just give up and get boring?

Well, he didn't.  Let's get that out of the way.  Oculus the feature is the same as Oculus the short, except it's totally different.  What we get here is a really logical expansion of the original story.  The backstory, which previously had only small hints and references, gets completely fleshed out in a way that makes total sense with the original story and fits in the context of the feature without seeming like a stretch.  All the new characters work and the twists are nice.  I liked just about everything about this movie.  It was just as scary, familiar but fresh and not predictable...just...really well done.

Being based on the original short, Oculus is about an attempt to objectively prove that a demonic mirror named the Lasser Glass is responsible for a string a murder/suicides going back over 100 years finally culminating in the deaths of the parents of the lead character(s).  However, being feature length enables the movie to spend a lot more time with everything and elaborate on the background of its extended cast.  The two biggest changes are the location and the lead character.  In the short it was only Tim Russel, but in the feature the lead character is actually Tim's sister, Kaylie.  Also, instead of the experiment taking place on what is  assumed to be neutral ground (the white room), the mirror is taken back to the Russel's house and placed back on the office wall where it previously hung.

The film itself takes place in the days following Tim's release from the mental hospital he's been undergoing treatment in since the incident with his parents.  Kaylie managed to avoid institutionalization and has been working for an auction house where she's tracked the mirror.  Tim's release happens to coincide with the auction sale of the mirror, and Kaylie seizes the opportunity to experiment on the mirror during the few days it will be allowed away from the auction house before being delivered to the next owner.  She convinces Tim, who is reluctant because of his therapy, to stay with her during the experiment.  They then repeat the setup of the short almost verbatim.

Intercut with the present day experimental footage is flashback footage of the family originally moving into the house and slowly deconstructing due to the mirror's influence.  What's interesting is that the present day sequences have much more of a subtle, vaguely uncomfortable, supernatural feel like Flanagan's previous work, while the flashbacks have a more visceral feel with gore and disgusting things.  The balance is great, especially because the creepier and more character driven present day scenes provide a great contrast for the bloody dementedness that eventually happens and makes that have a real impact.  I actually need to buy this on Blu-Ray when it comes out if for no other reason than there are bits I straight up did not see because it was so uncomfortable I had to look away.  Loved Ones, Asylum Blackout, and Martyrs all couldn't pull that off. 

Katee Sackhoff does an excellent turn as mother Marie Russel, though I would've liked to see her turn to a paranoid jealous wife a bit slower.  Rory Cochrane as Alan unfortunately never seems to sell the caring father portion either, his delivery through most of the movie is fairly deadpan.  Brenton Thwaites was a pleasant surprise as Tim.  Guy is so damned pretty I wasn't sure how well he'd be able to pull off a horror movie and emotional sibling drama but he actually did really well.  Karen Gillan performed admirably well as Kaylie.  Unfortunately, I feel like neither sibling really shined and the present day scenes really felt less interesting somehow than what was going on in the past, until the end.  They were good and they carried it well, but their scenes didn't pull me in as much as the scenes with their child actor counterparts.  I don't know if it was just Flanagan really getting into the opportunity to flesh out the world of Oculus or if the kids were just really good, but those scenes were really enjoyable.

The effects they use on the mirror ghosts as well are particularly nice and something I don't think I've seen much before.  Very creepy touch.  And I thought the direction at the end was just really compelling and totally sucked me in.  In fact, the only thing I think I was disappointed in was the big line in the original short ("I've met my demons and they are many, I've seen the Devil and he is me.") wasn't nearly as scary in the way it was delivered here.  That, and the lack of the gorgeously deranged "Finger LICKIN' GOOD!!!" line from the answering machine in the original.

To a minor spoiler:  I still dislike how quickly the experiment fell apart.  In the original it made sense despite being ultimately disappointing.  Being alone in a room with an evil demonic looking glass can be a somewhat taxing experience.  It kindof makes sense that Tim would fall asleep.  But in the feature no one falls asleep.  They just watch video of weird things, hallucinate, and then watch plants die without doing much of anything about it.  And finally, in the feature the glass suffers minor damage due to Tim shooting his insane father in front of the mirror and the glass cracking a piece off when Alan's body hits it.  The glass normally deflects attempts made to harm it fairly dramatically but it couldn't do anything about the body hitting it.  In the finale of the movie Tim activates the dead man's switch, not realizing Kaylie was standing in the way due to the mirror making him see things.  This causes a boat anchor to swing from the ceiling and hit Kaylie, killing her and smashing her into the mirror.  Given the force of a swinging boat anchor, especially one with additional weight on it, how did this not break the mirror further?  Kaylie demonstrates the pointy anchor going almost all the way into the wall behind the mirror.  It's not a light touch.  I would've loved to have seen the mirror effectively suicide itself.

--PXA

Horror Off-Season: 13 Ghosts 1960 and 2001 compared

13 Ghosts is one of my favorite movies.  It stars a post-American Pie Shannon Elizabeth and a pre-Monk Tony Shalhoub.  The movie is a remake of William Castle's 1960 13 Ghosts, which is interesting in itself in that it involved a pretty cool and specific gimmick: Illusion-O.

Rather than write a standard review, since even the remake is over a decade old at this point I thought it would be fun to sort of compare/contrast the two and see how the material was updated 40 years later.

So, first off, William Castle was famous for inventing tons of gimmicks to get audiences into his movies and get his movies talked about.  Just to name a few:

• Macabre (1958): Lloyds of London insured each audience member for $1,000 in case they die of fright during the movie.
• House on Haunted Hill (1959): Emerg-O, where a glow-in-the-dark skeleton was suspended over the audience for a climactic scene.
• The Tingler (1959): Percept-O, where he had theaters install electric joy-buzzers in some seats to give people electric shocks during a section where the monster came off the screen and into the audience.  
• Homicidal (1961): The Fright Break, immediately before the climax audience members who were too afraid would be allowed to leave the theater and be treated and calmed by a nurse in the lobby. 

Illusion-O was an early form of color filtering, where the majority of the movie was in standard black & white while certain scenes with ghosts in them where tinted blue and the ghosts were overlayed in red.  The audience could choose to either watch with blue tinted glasses or red ones, supposedly provided by the character Dr. Plato Zorba (Cyrus Kriticos in the remake).  The blue glasses would make the ghosts invisible and the red ones would make them stand out.  These glasses mirror the glasses in the movie the characters have to use to see the ghosts, and makes for a really interesting interactive element where you can choose how you want to see the scene.

Basic concept
The brief concept of the movie is largely the same as the original:  A rich relative dies and leaves his house to his nephew, who is struggling to financially support his family consisting of an attractive daughter and a son with an odd obsession.  In this house are 12 distinct spirits, and the nephew has been branded as the 13th.  In the original the supernatural happenings are more or less incidental to the main story arc, which is the lawyer's attempt to find the uncle's hidden fortune.  The remake obviously places a greater emphasis on the supernatural aspect making it the main focus and inventing a ghost-powered mechanism.  This is pretty obvious as the opening scene in the remake is Cyrus and Dennis in the act of entrapping a ghost named "The Juggernaut", a scene that establishes the uncle's character as a ghost hunter with massive resources and also a lot of the internal mythology invented for the movie.  The original opened with a short title sequence and then started the story with a short bit of Cyrus lecturing at an archeology museum.

The Family
The characters are pretty similar in archetype, as mentioned above but the remake differs slightly.  The original had a "complete" family of Cyrus and Hilda as husband and wife with son, Buck, and daughter, Medea.  The uncle is Plato Zorba and the lawyer is Ben Rush.  Elaine Zacharides is the maid at the house and Cyrus has a friend named Van Allen, they serve as exposition speakers.  The remake has a "broken" family, because the wife has died and the husband has to continue as a single father...something that wasn't nearly as accepted in 1960.  So the father is Arthur Kriticos with son, Bobby, and daughter, Kathy.  The uncle is Cyrus Kriticos and the lawyer is Ben Moss.  The remake invents the characters of Kalina Oretzia and Dennis Rafkin to serve exposition, but they are unfamiliar to Arthur and more closely related to the uncle, Cyrus.  They've also invented Maggie Bess to serve as Bobby and Kathy's nanny, although I think the motivation for the character's creation was really to have a sassy black female played by a popular musician.

What's interesting is that in the original, Cyrus was characterized much more as husband and family man.  He had a slightly adversarial relationship with his wife and seemed firstly concerned with the family unit as a nebulous whole and then his wife.  When the character becomes Arthur in the remake he's very much the father and is concerned with his kids over all else.  His emotions and reactions to any threats confronting his kids are much more powerful and immediate while Cyrus seems restrained and sometimes even uninvolved with the situation.

The Ghosts
The original's ghosts are all fairly unique, and they explain some of them in the story.  None of them are particularly hostile towards the family, apart from one scene in which the ghost of a chef in the kitchen throws a kitchen knife at the wall and almost hits Cyrus.  The ghosts don't really serve any particular point in the narrative except to be spooky, and they don't even have particularly involved backgrounds.  The two that are explained the most are a lion tamer, who's head was bitten off by a lion (and the lion) and a chef who catches his love with another man and kills them both.

One of the things that I really liked about the remake is the ghosts were central to the story about the house being a machine, and they all had rich backgrounds which were alluded to in the movie itself and expanded upon further by a DVD extra.  The ghosts all are made to fit distinct archetypes from a "Black Zodiac" created for the film.  Since the whole story is more focused on the supernatural aspect they spend a lot of effort creating and showing this internal mythology with quicksilver flares, spoken spells on reel-to-reel tapes, written spells carved into the glass walls of the house, cubes, even the glasses take a more consistent and frequent role.  I noticed that in the original there was only a single pair of glasses, often worn by Cyrus.  Buck seemed to be able to see the ghosts pretty well without the glasses, as evidenced by him telling his parents to move out of the way of the knife before it was thrown in the kitchen scene. 

In Closing
Neither movie is particularly scary, but I think if you're in the right mindset and especially with the glasses the original has a lot more potential even though the entire story and supernatural aspects in particular are a lot weaker.  The remake suffers from everything being so well designed and just "Damn, isn't that COOL?!" to really get under your skin and unnerve you.  However, I think that also makes its production design and visual style strengths as entrance to Bro-horror.  Although I wouldn't call this bro-horror in the strictest sense because it does hit some very good emotional cues.  A lot of people absolutely hate Matthew Lillard, but I don't think he's that bad of an actor and the way his character, Dennis, grows attached to Arthur's family and even sacrifices himself in the end is quite touching.  It's also got a lot of depth to the universe because of the spell rules and the backstories given to each ghost, it all feels very solid and fleshed out.  I would almost want to see more movies that play around with the mythology established for this remake of a William Castle gimmick movie from 1960.

October Horror 2011: Day 14 - The Thing (2011)

This movie isn't a remake by strict definition but is, in fact, a prequel.  However the story and premise is so similar to that of the original that it could easily be a remake with creative editing.

The first The Thing was released in 1982, written by Bill Lancaster (of Bad News Bears fame) and directed by John Carpenter.  The movie was itself a remake of the 1951 movie The Thing from Another World, which was based on the 1938 novella Who Goes There?, though Carpenter's movie is more faithful to the source material than the original movie.  Carpenter had effectively invented the modern slasher 4 years prior with 1978's Halloween and the original movie really saw him upping his game.  The film is considered a horror classic for its bleeding edge special effects and effectiveness in creating sensations of claustrophobia and paranoia.  The movie was rife with brooding tension that exploded effectively at the finale.  It was brilliant combination of bizarre and disgusting with tense and psychological, and is consistently ranked one of the scariest movies of all time.

The prequel was written by Ronald Moore, a writer for Star Treks TNG, DS9, and VOY and Battlestar: Galactica, and Eric Heisserer who wrote the screenplay for the Nightmare remake and the script for Final Destination 5.  It was directed by Matthijs van Heijningen Jr., in his feature film directorial debut.

The basics of the story is that a research team at a remote Antarctic station encounter an alien monster that has the capability to perfectly mimic any organism at the cellular level.  The alien feeds on each member of the team while they slowly fall apart and turn on each other due to their suspicion that one of the others is The Thing.  In the end the research station is destroyed in an attempt to kill the creature and the final few survivors are left in the unforgiving cold to die, unable to trust each other.

The only major variation from this is that in the prequel they dig up the alien before it breaks out, and the end of the prequel dovetails directly into the opening shot of the original movie.

The prequel has a bit more of a meandering opening while it assembles its cast and establishes the setting.  I will say that the sweeping shots of the snowy wasteland are pretty gorgeous.  It also picks a much more higher pitch once the action does start, burning through cast members much more quickly than the original did.  It made it a bit chaotic at times, and hard to follow.  To an extent this served to highlight the chaos and panic in the film, but it was too easy to lose track of characters which is a bit disappointing to me when I'm trying to follow a story.  It also did a pretty decent job of recreating the claustrophobic environments of the first movie, but not so much the paranoia.  The movie moved too quickly to really identify with any of the characters, although I think that was more because it was trying to make you feel like you were part of the events by dragging you through the plot at a break-neck speed.

Early on there was some awkward hand-held camera shots, which is usually a way of placing the audience inside a scene and making the action seem tense and unstable.  Thankfully it either stopped being as noticeable or they stopped using it before the middle point.

The worst point of the entire movie is probably the CGI, and that is to say it was jaw-droppingly terrible.  The original did everything with incredible models, animatronics, puppets, and massive creativity in picking their shots.  Everything looked real and disgusting, albeit a bit hokey sometimes.  This remake uses real, practical effects sparingly, and even then it uses them when the monster is mostly out of shot.  I'm sure this saved them money, but it meant that when the monster was being shown in all its glory it was entirely CG.  So what should have been the most horrifying and disgusting shots were reduced to CGI that would have looked dated 5 years ago.  There were definitely spots when it looked good, but it was also very hard to be afraid of because of the spots where it looked like a stupid.

In fact, the majority of the forms the monster took that were new to this movie (e.g. the woman's head hanging off the back of the monster) looked silly.  The best ones were when they borrowed forms from the original movie.  It had to be in the two-faced, backwards form by the end for the original timeline to work, and when it got there it looked the best.

The theater I saw it in had the sound up absurdly loud, and the creature sounds were really high pitched.  The sound system assaulted me and left me a bruised and battered man.  It was traumatic.

All negatives aside, I actually thought this was a pretty decent movie.  It wasn't quite as good as the original because of the really bad CGI.  The decision to focus more on chaos and panic was well served by the faster pacing, although I really liked the paranoia and tension of the first one.  This doesn't quite hold up to the original as a horror film, because the creature effects and sense of claustrophobia in the original are much scarier than the immersion in the chaos of the prequel.

This was a fun scifi/action/thriller.  Watch this, then watch the original to continue the story and get creeped the hell out.

Re-rererererere week is over!  Tomorrow night, Found Footage week starts with [REC]

October Horror 2011: Day 13 - Fright Night (2011)

Last year's October Horror month started with the original Fright Night, from 1985.

I really like how they've updated the original for this remake.  Instead of copping out and just updating the setting and some superficial trimmings they really revamped (lawl) the entire story and all the characters to make sense in a modern context.

The basic idea here is that a vampire moves into a cookie-cutter suburban neighborhood, and the nerdy guy living next door discovers he's actually a vampire.  No one believes him, and he eventually loses his best friend and girl-interest to the vampire.  His only hope is to enlist Peter Vincent, an entertainer who appears to be "faking the funk", to help him kill the vampire and protect his mom.  The vampire is a funny character because while being ostensibly a modern predatory alpha male in both movies he's still bound by old-school vampire rules.  There's a pretty funny scene where Colin Ferrel's vampire is fishing for an invitation from Anton Yelchin's Charley.

The character that was updated the most was probably Peter Vincent.  In the original Peter Vincent was a meek old man played by Roddy McDowall.  He was the host of a late night horror movie show called "Fright Night", which showed the 1930's-1950's Hammer Studios-style gothic horror films Vincent once starred in.  In the remake Peter Vincent is a multimillionaire magician performing a highly theatrical stage show in Las Vegas called "Fright Night" in which he battles vampires and a host of other demons with the power of magic.  He's also a collector of rare and magical artifacts and books, mostly concerning vampires, which he keeps in his gigantic hotel penthouse along with his gorgeous wife.  His wife hates his guts, he's completely superficial, and quite often hammered on Midori liqueur.  The character is played with a sloppy, but confident, swagger by David Tennant.  He's very fun to watch in the role, although there are a few time when he falls into the giddy and excitable Dr. Who mannerisms which don't seem to fit very well.

It's a nice casual vampire movie, very well executed.  It's not a dark story, or dark humor, but not quite as comedic as something like Shaun of the Dead.  A good balance of somewhat unsettling visual effects and light story.

And I definitely don't see Christopher Mintz-Plasse getting into gay porn for a decade like the original "Evil" Ed.

Anyway.  Tomorrow is a return to the Theatre for The Thing.

October Horror 2011: Day 12 - Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

Edit, 6/30/2014: So I messed something up here. It had been a few years since I'd watched the original Nightmare so it wasn't exactly fresh in my mind. The whole plot from the remake regarding the original kids' connection to Freddy was a pure invention of that film. In the original this didn't happen at all and Krueger was a straight child murderer, not an accused molester. For some reason I had thought this plot existed in the original but was left ambiguous in the sense that the kids accused him and the parents took out their vigilante justice but it was never confirmed and the remake messed it up by making it a did-he/didn't-he mystery that was confirmed as he did. Adding the molestation at all still adds a dimension of sexual deviancy to the character but it also changes Freddy's motivations completely. This time around he's simply seeking revenge on kids who told their parents what he had done, leading them to kill him. However in the original, Freddy's connection to the kids was through the actions of their parents who killed him after he was acquitted of murder, very much visiting the sins of the parents upon the children old testament style.
So I got it wrong about the ambiguity since that plot was never in the original film, but I think the point about the backstory change is legitimate because he's still a less interesting character when he's out for simple revenge on the kids who led to his being caught for child-boning. The Nightmare on Elm Street franchise began in 1984. The first movie, and most of the series was written and directed by horror magnate Wes Craven.  The series spawned 9 sequels, including a cross over with Jason Vorhees.  However, the series lost steam and the final Freddy-only movie was 1994's New Nightmare.  Freddy was dormant again until 2003 when Freddy Vs. Jason was released.

Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes company produced this 2010 remake, which was written by the writer of the Doom movie and the directorial debut of Samuel Bayer (who had previously only done music videos).  Robert Englund didn't reprise his role as the iconic Freddy and was replaced by Jackie Earle Haley, fresh off roles as Rorschach in Watchmen and George Noyce in Shutter Island.

Background aside, I really hate this movie.  I think it's one of the worst major productions and an absolute affront to one of the most iconic horror franchises ever.

The movie relies far too much on jump scares, which really devalues the more atmospheric scenes in between jump scare scenes.  Each individual scene is actually pretty well put together, but the movie as a whole never comes together.  There's just not a lot of tension, and even though the nightmares look very good they don't serve to be scary or unnerving in any way.  This is probably because of a dependency on CGI, which I don't normally find too much of a detractor but here it just doesn't look very good.

They also changed the backstory of the Freddy character to make him more blatantly evil, instead of the ambiguous nature of the original Freddy.  His characterization is also more of a nasty, sexual, and aggressive monster and less of a mischievous and silly but also warped and dangerous.  Some of the glove mannerisms contributed by Haley are a nice addition but the lackadaisical delivery of the lines makes it seem like Freddy's taken a horse tranquilizer and is trying to get some ass before he passes out.  The changes to the character really remove the dynamic nature that separated him from the lumbering beasts that ordinarily inhabit the slasher genre, and without that everything seems a bit mediocre.

The original movie's effects aren't even that bad.  The fashions are a bit dated, but the movie certainly doesn't feel as old as some of the others from the 70s and 80s I've watched.  It's well worth watching over this.  This is just...not interesting, not scary.  It may have worked better if they'd invented their own supernatural slasher, but new-Freddy can't hold a candle to old-Freddy and it brings the remake down to "generic".

Next up, a trip to the Theatre for Fright Night.

October Horror 2011: Day 11 - Friday the 13th (2009)

The first Friday the 13th was released in 1980 to cash in on the popularity of Halloween.  That film was a success on its own and spawned 9 sequels and a crossover with Freddy of Nightmare on Elm Street before being rebooted by Michael Bay's Platinum Dunes production company.

The original's plot centered around a group of teens who have been hired as camp counselors to get an abandoned campground at Crystal Lake running again.  Years ago the camp was shut down following the drowning death of a mentally disabled camper.  The camper was unsupervised because the counselors who were meant to watch him were screwing.  Standard slasher moralizing.  There's a fairly excellent twist ending, before twist endings were cliche.

The remake destroys the twist from the original within a minute or two of its running time and is nowhere near as focused in plot.  It meanders a bit, I think for the sake of upping its body count.

The new version begins with a flashback to Jason's childhood, then fastforwards to a group of delinquent teens hiking in the woods.  They're trekking to find a large crop of wild marijuana hidden in the wood with plans to harvest the plants and then sell them and get massively rich.  They make camp for the night and proceed to drink, smoke, and screw until Jason appears to punish them all for their promiscuity.  Jason dispatches them all within a few minutes and cue credits.

6 weeks later we meet a slightly larger and even douchier group of teens heading to Ritchie Rich's father's cabin in the woods.  There's a tangential relation to the first group of teens in Sam from Supernatural, who is the brother of one of the girls in the first group.  They make it up to the cabin where they drink, smoke, and screw.  The characters play their stereotypes pretty well, even if it is a bit obnoxious.  It does serve to distinguish everyone and provide some semblance of a personality to identify with, which is nice.

The murder is very fun, pretty well paced, varied, and creative.  There's also a lot of real practical effects instead of CG which really helps them look meaty.

It's a little dark and high contrast, but such is the way with most modern horror movies.

However, the characters in the first are much better, the kills are more fun since they're much better lit.  The original story is better than the remake, and the twist at the end I think is part of what made it such a classic.  It is very 70's-tastic since it was only 1980, but if you can stomach that it's a much worthier movie to watch.

Next up:  Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

October Horror 2011: Day 10 - Prom Night (2008)

Prom Night was a Canadian slash movie released in 1980.  It starred Jamie Lee Curtis, who was also in the original Halloween.  I haven't seen the original film so I can only evaluate this one as it stands alone.


The premise is that a young girl's teacher develops an obsession with her, and is fired from the school.  He then breaks into her house and kills her entire family in front of her as she hides in the closet.  3 years of intense therapy and adoption by her aunt and uncle later, she's all grown up and about to graduate high school.

However, the killer escaped jail and tracked her down on the night of the senior prom.  In his obsessive jealousy he then stalks the hotel where the dance is held, killing off hotel employees and all the girl's friends.  The majority of these kills are quick and obfuscated stabs to the abdomen with a large pocket knife.

All the killings are identical, so they all blur together.  This effect isn't helped by how generic all the characters are.  At best case the character has shown enough personality to be disliked as a shallow caricature of a high school stereotype.  There's no one to identify with, so there is no horror to what is happening.  Even the lead character, who we spend a lot of time with, fails to connect.  The actress was decent, the writing just didn't give her anything except a series of scenes to wander through.

The movie's glossy and well constructed but flat and utterly uninteresting.  It's not even particularly bloody or suspenseful.  I can't say I disliked watching it, I was just a little bored because I didn't get anything gory to watch or anything interesting to think about.

Next up: Friday the 13th (2009)

October Horror 2011: Day 9 - Halloween (2007)

The original Halloween was released in 1978 under the direction of John Carpenter.  The film was one of the progenitors of the original slasher genre and gave birth to one of its most recognizable icons.  It's basically the guidebook for how to make a slasher movie.

Old school Halloween focused more on suspense than is standard for the genre it spawned, and was fueled by what might be the best soundtrack in all of horror movie history.  In fact, when Halloween was first screened all audiences found it boring and tame but once the famous odd-time theme was introduced the exact same footage was exciting and tense.  I could easily music-theory-nerd on the theme for an hour, but I digress.

Halloween: H20 attempted to rebuild the ailing franchise in 1998, at the tail end of the 90's slasher resurgence led by Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, and Urban Legend.  But despite an impressive performance at the box office, this was the last film of the original Michael Myers timeline.

This 2007 reboot is directed by Rob Zombie, who had previously directed House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects which were very slick but mostly bizarre and gory.  Zombie's version differs quite a lot from the original in tone and characterization.  While Carpenter's film was mostly Laurie Strode's story, Zombie's version is very much Michael's story and includes a lengthy origin story where we see Michael's childhood, and psychotic break.  We also see his first few months being treated by Dr. Loomis, and then his escape from the psychiatric hospital.  Here, Zombie is playing the long game, similar to many super hero movies that spend most of their first installment on the origin story.  It's paid off since now that Michael is a real character who we've actually seen go from child to monster and that makes him infinitely more compelling.  It also means the sequel can pick right up and continue developing the mythology in a sane way instead of the ridiculous progression the original timeline took.

One odd thing I thought was a bit tacked in was an actual Michael Myers mask.  In the '78 version the iconic mask was actually a Captain Kirk mask that was spray painted white.  Michael stole the mask from a local costume shop when he first arrived in town.  In the '07 version it's an actual Michael Myers Halloween mask that Judith Myers' boyfriend puts on while they're getting ready to bone.  He then tries to convince her to let him wear it while the screw.  The scene is just weird and contributes nothing except to introduce the mask so that Michael can save it and wear it later.

I really want to see Zombie's sequel to this now, because this movie was just really good.  It had good characterization, creative direction and camera work, great tension, fun kills and excellent make up and effects.  I really enjoyed the original movie, and this version is a perfect homage to it while still standing up on its own as the beginning of a new Michael Myers timeline.

On deck:  Prom Night (2008)

October Horror 2011: Day 8 - Dawn of the Dead (2004)

The first Dawn of the Dead was a George Romera zombie movie from 1978, part of the original Trilogy of the Dead which consisted of 1968's Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and 1985's Day of the Dead.

This 2004 remake was directed by Zack Snyder (300, Watchmen, Suckerpunch).  The film is visually striking and is awash with Snyder's signatures, including specific use of slow motion and a noticeable soundtrack using contemporary songs.  The story of both movies are fairly similar: In the middle of the Zombie Apocalypse a small group of survivors lock themselves inside of a shopping mall and deal with personal conflicts while trying to survive the growing number of zombies amassing outside and in the lower floors of the mall.  Beyond that there isn't much similarity.

The original film was rife with social commentary about consumerist culture and materialism, which doesn't present itself at all in the remake.  The remake plays more with personal drama between characters but is far less high minded.  Also, zombies in the remake have human or better capabilities while the original featured Romero's famed slow zombies.

The remake on its own is very entertaining.  The writing is good and the characters are fun.  It's got a nice, brisk pace that manages to avoid dragging too much towards the end of the 2nd act.  The effects are really good and realistically bloody.  The zombies were scary, the actions scenes were pretty tense.  The non-action scenes served pretty well to setup the next bit of story while maintaining a slightly desperate or creepy tone.  I really liked the soundtrack with short montages set to Johnny Cash and Richard Cheese.

In fact, I think the only thing I didn't actually like about this movie was the subplot with Mekhi Phifer and his Russian Mail-order Bride.  I honestly don't believe anyone that "From the Hood", or that street smart, would be that damned stupid.  Plus, that scene killed off one of my favorite characters.

The original movie had a pretty uncertain ending, where you could decide for yourself if you wanted the characters to live or die.  The remake's ending was a lot more clear-cut, or at least I thought.  When I had watched this I was convinced the cast all died in the final zombie attack where the camera is dropped, but wikipedia describes this ending as "leaving their fate unknown".

Either way, it's a great zombie movie that's very well balanced between human drama, gore, and action.  It's well worth watching both, since the original is a classic, but this one capably stands on its own.  It's also pretty obvious watching it that the Dead Rising video game took some major cues from the movie: Exploding gas station, set in a mall, unorthodox weapons, a dog.  The biker gang in the original movie is pretty similar to the convicts in the game.  Dead Rising in some ways led to the Left 4 Dead series and by proxy Dead Island.  So yeah.  Good movie.

Re-week continues tomorrow with Rob Zombie's Halloween.