I was reading horror reviews and I found one on H2 that I felt mirrored exactly what I felt when watching it & I am glad critics are as baffled as I am - all of my friend's who love Rob Zombie insist the film made sense, but for the life of me I don't know what any of it means & I think I am passably perceptive - certainly perceptive enough to understand a Halloween film if there is anything to understand. Months later I am still googling "what was the underlying point of Halloween 2" or "what did the end of Halloween 2 mean" & I'd never admit that usually, because it makes me feel fucking stupid, but apparently alot of people are as baffled as I am because I can't find an answer outside of shrugs.
But Zombie never figures out how to make a movie out of all of this. He has Michael seeing visions of his mother and himself as a young boy on the night that he killed his sister, and he has the survivors going about their business, but except for the fact that you know Myers has to show up in town there feels like no good reason for any of it. None of it builds to anything - my friend Brian Collins noted that you could rearrange almost any of Myers' scenes and it would be impossible to tell the difference - and so the whole film, as it comes to third act, feels like a slog. There are good moments - I liked the scene of Loomis' book signing, where he has to deal with both a weirdo serial killer fan and an angry parent of one of Myers' victims - but if ever a film felt scriptless and formless, it's this one. The good scenes are lost in the larger narrative, which meanders slowly along.
A scene when Michael comes after Annie in her bathroom is incredibly powerful when played very, very slow and almost silently. There are also some terrific dream sequences that gives Zombie a chance to play around with style and to get weirder than even his already fairly weird movie could otherwise hold. One shot in particular, of Laurie running through a dark forest that is illuminated by brilliant blue spears of light, is downright gorgeous and evocative. But all of the great cinematography in the world doesn't clear up what he's getting at with these visions. His version of Myers has a serious mama complex (coupled with his love of the wood and the rednecks who live in them, doesn't it seem like Zombie should have just gone for the Friday the 13th remake? He's in the wrong franchise), so that makes sense, but what about the young Mike? If mom is a ghost, what is Lil Mikey? I thought maybe he was the ghost of the boy who 'died' the night he killed his sister, but that doesn't really make sense, thematically or contextually. This Lil Mikey is a servant of the mother, who herself is urging Michael on his killing spree. She also keeps his calendar, at one point telling him it's almost Halloween (I wonder if she wakes him in the morning, too). So Lil Mikey is just as bloodthirsty as Big Mikey, and just as much as Mom (at one point Mom tells Michael to 'have fun;' we don't see the ensuing murder fully, but the victim ends up naked - did Michael rape her? That's something I would actually expect from Zombie, I just wouldn't expect him to be so circumspect about it), so I don't get what the fuck he's doing there. I imagine the real answer is that Zombie thought it would be cool looking.
And that's what a lot of the film boils down to - what Zombie thinks is cool. If he had more time, or maybe more inclination to think about it, I think Zombie could have done something really special with this film. He's certainly on that path. But every aspect that really worked is stuck between three or four others that just fall flat, or are ridiculous. And the 'deeper' aspects of the film are, finally, half-baked. I kept waiting for all of the vision stuff to coalesce into something, and it almost does when Laurie starts seeing visions as well... but even that makes no sense. Maybe she would see her birth mother's ghost, but Michael's little self? At the end of the movie she's being held down by Lil Mikey, although no one else can see him - what the fuck does this mean? Watching the muddled, anticlimactic finale I get the impression this was not the ending that Zombie set out to make; I had heard very credible rumors that the original ending was far weirder, and everything leading up to the final shot lends credence to those rumors. In the end, though, it all plays out as ideas that were too big for Zombie to wrap his screenplay around mixed in with shit he thought was kewl.
One thing I'll say for this movie - it inspired me to write this much. And if I was writing with spoilers, I think I could go even longer. To me a film that gives you this much to chew on can't be simply classified as a bad film, and with few exceptions, Zombie's a good filmmaker. His style is strong, and he can build scenes that work, but he can't string them together into anything that goes anywhere or has meaning. He's crippled by his own major limitations as a screenwriter, and I kept wishing that someone had sat down with Zombie to hammer out this script in a way where it would work. Again, there are concepts here, scenes here, characters here that are terrific, but they're lost in a mess.
I am thinking about lamps. Anyone have suggestions for nice looking lamps that give GOOD lighting? I am seriously considering asking the menfolk around here if they would rewire my lighting (or whatever it takes) so this room has a fluorescent sheet light & instead of mounting it to the top of the ceiling have it hang down by short chains - it makes me think of horror films, when one of those sheets rocks and the shadows flicker everywhere. But other than that it would just be really bright, good lighting which I need for my slide slicing, my specimen setting, and my general craftfuckery. I generally see those lights in the basements of serialkiller/torturers in film and I think they are on to something.
I have been washing curtains and cleaning blinds - cleaning blinds is the toiling work of the devil, I am certain of it.
But Zombie never figures out how to make a movie out of all of this. He has Michael seeing visions of his mother and himself as a young boy on the night that he killed his sister, and he has the survivors going about their business, but except for the fact that you know Myers has to show up in town there feels like no good reason for any of it. None of it builds to anything - my friend Brian Collins noted that you could rearrange almost any of Myers' scenes and it would be impossible to tell the difference - and so the whole film, as it comes to third act, feels like a slog. There are good moments - I liked the scene of Loomis' book signing, where he has to deal with both a weirdo serial killer fan and an angry parent of one of Myers' victims - but if ever a film felt scriptless and formless, it's this one. The good scenes are lost in the larger narrative, which meanders slowly along.
A scene when Michael comes after Annie in her bathroom is incredibly powerful when played very, very slow and almost silently. There are also some terrific dream sequences that gives Zombie a chance to play around with style and to get weirder than even his already fairly weird movie could otherwise hold. One shot in particular, of Laurie running through a dark forest that is illuminated by brilliant blue spears of light, is downright gorgeous and evocative. But all of the great cinematography in the world doesn't clear up what he's getting at with these visions. His version of Myers has a serious mama complex (coupled with his love of the wood and the rednecks who live in them, doesn't it seem like Zombie should have just gone for the Friday the 13th remake? He's in the wrong franchise), so that makes sense, but what about the young Mike? If mom is a ghost, what is Lil Mikey? I thought maybe he was the ghost of the boy who 'died' the night he killed his sister, but that doesn't really make sense, thematically or contextually. This Lil Mikey is a servant of the mother, who herself is urging Michael on his killing spree. She also keeps his calendar, at one point telling him it's almost Halloween (I wonder if she wakes him in the morning, too). So Lil Mikey is just as bloodthirsty as Big Mikey, and just as much as Mom (at one point Mom tells Michael to 'have fun;' we don't see the ensuing murder fully, but the victim ends up naked - did Michael rape her? That's something I would actually expect from Zombie, I just wouldn't expect him to be so circumspect about it), so I don't get what the fuck he's doing there. I imagine the real answer is that Zombie thought it would be cool looking.
And that's what a lot of the film boils down to - what Zombie thinks is cool. If he had more time, or maybe more inclination to think about it, I think Zombie could have done something really special with this film. He's certainly on that path. But every aspect that really worked is stuck between three or four others that just fall flat, or are ridiculous. And the 'deeper' aspects of the film are, finally, half-baked. I kept waiting for all of the vision stuff to coalesce into something, and it almost does when Laurie starts seeing visions as well... but even that makes no sense. Maybe she would see her birth mother's ghost, but Michael's little self? At the end of the movie she's being held down by Lil Mikey, although no one else can see him - what the fuck does this mean? Watching the muddled, anticlimactic finale I get the impression this was not the ending that Zombie set out to make; I had heard very credible rumors that the original ending was far weirder, and everything leading up to the final shot lends credence to those rumors. In the end, though, it all plays out as ideas that were too big for Zombie to wrap his screenplay around mixed in with shit he thought was kewl.
One thing I'll say for this movie - it inspired me to write this much. And if I was writing with spoilers, I think I could go even longer. To me a film that gives you this much to chew on can't be simply classified as a bad film, and with few exceptions, Zombie's a good filmmaker. His style is strong, and he can build scenes that work, but he can't string them together into anything that goes anywhere or has meaning. He's crippled by his own major limitations as a screenwriter, and I kept wishing that someone had sat down with Zombie to hammer out this script in a way where it would work. Again, there are concepts here, scenes here, characters here that are terrific, but they're lost in a mess.
I am thinking about lamps. Anyone have suggestions for nice looking lamps that give GOOD lighting? I am seriously considering asking the menfolk around here if they would rewire my lighting (or whatever it takes) so this room has a fluorescent sheet light & instead of mounting it to the top of the ceiling have it hang down by short chains - it makes me think of horror films, when one of those sheets rocks and the shadows flicker everywhere. But other than that it would just be really bright, good lighting which I need for my slide slicing, my specimen setting, and my general craftfuckery. I generally see those lights in the basements of serialkiller/torturers in film and I think they are on to something.
I have been washing curtains and cleaning blinds - cleaning blinds is the toiling work of the devil, I am certain of it.
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