Screenhead

Seems Warner Brothers is offering up some Officially Licensed Apparel for your Halloween costuming needs, and has thus opened up the WBooShop to offer a collection of costumes for kids and adults at pretty significant discounts.

For kids, they can offer up Harry Potter gear, the vast panoply of DC superheroes and some stuff you wouldn’t expect would be a big deal for kids, like the old Hanna-Barbera costumes (seriously, when’s the last time you heard a kid say he wanted to be Fred Flintstone for Halloween?).

Meanwhile, grownups plotting costume parties of their own can also swing by and snag some gear from big-boy franchises like Friday the 13th, Nightmare On Elm Street, 300 and Watchmen, as well as the other DC heroes (what, like you wouldn’t dress up like Batman if you were going out?).  Hey, why not?  You may not have the abs to pull off King Leonidas but anyone can smirk “No.” from under his Rorschach mask.

So if you’re looking for a costume this Halloween, swing by the WBooShop and grab what you need.

Okay, I just got done writing up the review of Trick R Treat, and what do I hear?  They’re planning the sequel already!

Frankly, this isn’t a surprise for a whole lot of reasons.  One, Trick R Treat kicked a whole lot of ass and it was downright awesome, except for some problems I had with about the last three minutes.  Two, it’s currently one of the biggest sellers on Amazon.  And three, it’s getting great reviews.  For crying out loud, it got a nine out of ten here, and you KNOW how hard it is to get anything over a seven out here.

Now, of course, no one’s actually said anything about what will be in this one, but chances are there’ll be plenty of blood and guts and assorted splatter for literally an hour and a half on end.  But if it’s as good as the first, we’re going to be in for a whole lot of fun when next Halloween comes around if it stays on the same schedule.

I was definitely looking forward to a copy of Trick R Treat.  It had just about everything you could have wanted in a horror flick–myth, legend, doublecrosses, strange monsters, creepy whatsits…and of course some unexpected bonuses like Thurman Merman himself from Bad Santa briefly showing up and impressively projectile-vomiting all over the set.  That was just awesome.

Anyway, today we’re talking Trick R Treat, which just became available today in video stores.  From Warner Premiere, this impressive little horror flick is one of the rare breed of overarching-vignette stories that we haven’t seen in quite some time.  You’ll follow a series of interconnecting and overarching stories as they talk about a wife whose husband loves Halloween, and why she should too, then over to a local principal with a secret, a young virgin’s pursuit of that “special someone”, a terrifying prank gone horribly wrong, and a sour old man who could use a little sweetening up for Halloween.

The great thing about Trick R Treat is that most of it is good.  There’s a lot of creepy fun to be had here and most of the sketches will satisfy like a king size Snickers.  There’s not even terribly much to say about most of the movie except that it’s really, spectacularly good.  I was just about to horrifyingly force the Screenhead Ten Scale to hand over yet ANOTHER ten until about the last five minutes.

Somebody owes me an explanation for the last five minutes and they’d better do so lickety-damn-split.  Because I take SERIOUS issue with an ending that won’t even play by its own rule book.  They go to spectacular lengths to illustrate how important the burning jack o’lantern is in keeping away “evil spirits”, and yet, despite the fact that the last victim of the night has easily a couple dozen burning on his porch, he’s STILL ripped to shreds.

Admittedly, on a percentage basis, this is a minor gripe, even if it’s a pretty low blow, especially when I was enjoying the movie so well.  And despite this fairly sizable screw-up, it’s about the only one.

Thus, the Screenhead Ten Scale acknowledges that it’s being a bit of a fussbudget about things and hands over the fair rating of nine out of ten.  Had they fixed that last problem, we’d have yet another perfect dose of horror on our hands.

Once again we’ve got a special super-secret advance preview for you, folks–today we’re talking about Pandemic, which will be available for you to see just in time for Halloween, October 27th.  And though it will be familiar ground to say the least, you should still get something out of it.

Pandemic brings us a small town veterinarian who’s discovered something very odd about the local wildlife.  It’s developing a particularly nasty bug that kills within hours (and not too many of them) of exposure.  Worse, this bug not only does horrendous things to critters, it also does likewise to humans. And once the army gets wind of it, well, here we go on the trail to Quarantine Town, with stops in Eventually We’re Going to Commit Mass Murder Village.  So now, our veterinarian is going to have to get to the bottom of all this and hopefully manage to get out alive in the process.

Yes, the comparisons between this and other pandemic titles like Outbreak and The Crazies and such will be so inevitable as to make most folks wonder what took them so long getting there, but they’re no less accurate for the inevitability.  If you couldn’t get enough of scientist heroes, then Pandemic is going to be right up your alley.  It’ll seem familiar, but this shouldn’t be interpreted as bad.  They don’t seriously screw anything up here and play it all very strictly by the numbers.

Advance warning, however–this sucker could not be much more depressing if it tried.  Of course, for those of you out there who believe that the United States government is actually capable of testing biological weapons on humanity, you’ll get a sort of cold vindication out of this movie.

The Screenhead Ten Scale hands Pandemic a six out of ten for a lot of unoriginal material, but for at least not bungling what it stole very hard.

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, the film isn’t even cooled down and put in the cans yet for shipping to theatres just in time for Halloween, but Saw VII–yes, that’s a SEVEN–is already in pre-production.

And yes, it’s still in 3-D.

From David Hackl’s Facebook page:

“SAW VII 3D pre production begins TODAY!! I’m so cranked. The story is always the most important thing in my opinion. This time I want it to be a game for everyone. I want to create the effect of feeling like you are right in a trap.“

Ohhhhhh boy.  This could either be a doozy or a mistake of catastrophic proportions.  There’s a very good chance that it will be something interesting; it’s certainly the first time Saw has ever been offered up in 3-D, but the first time for anything is an extremely volatile proposition.

Naturally, we’ll have to wait until next October to see how this one turns out.

I genuinely don’t know what to say on this one.  Really, I don’t. I’m so spectacularly conflicted that it’s not even funny.

I was reading this newsy bit the other day, and it turns out they’re looking to make a third installment of The Ring.  See, the first one did so spectacularly well at the box office, that it got a second, and even though the second one didn’t do quite so well, the FIRST one had success enough to justify amplifying it into an entire full-on trilogy.  That by itself would be lukewarm news, but here’s the kicker–they’re going to do it in 3-D.

Now, this represents the second announcement of a third title of a remake series that would be appearing in 3-D. First, Halloween, and now The Ring, which was a remake  of the original Japanese, Ringu.

While I LOVE the thought of a 3-D Ring, with the absolutely required footage of Samara pulling her haunted undead ass out of the movie screen in front of us (you KNOW that has to happen!  It can’t NOT!), I can’t help but think that this has entirely too much chance of winding up some sleazy cash grab, much like the Halloween series it’s unconsciously emulating.

So you can see my conflict–a third entry could be pretty lousy, but it has the potential to be pretty interesting.  Given the sheer number of times before we’ve all been burned on this, I’m not holding out a whole lot of hope.  But there’s every possibility, so let’s hope for the best.

So despite the fact that Halloween 2 got pounded in the ratings over the weekend, losing to both the fourth installment of Final Destination and the second week of Inglourious Basterds, the Weinstein company is planning to unleash a THIRD installment of the Halloween series, this time in 3-D.

But here’s the especially odd part–the Weinsteins will NOT be inviting Rob Zombie back to run it.

Hey, maybe that means we’ll get our next installment of Halloween WITHOUT Sheri Moon Zombie!  That’d be kind of nice…Deborah Myers was supposed to be dead from the beginning.  Word out of Camp Weinstein however is that they wanted someone with a “new perspective”.

That’s good…hopefully the “new perspective” in question will be “more like the original”.  And maybe, just maybe, the “new perspective” will also be “good”.  But considering it was a 3-D movie that took out Rob Zombie’s run, is this just a case of monkey see / monkey do in which they try to recover their losses on this one by emulating the movie that took them out?

This might be a bad move anyway, as, let’s be honest–it’s not the lack of 3-D that took Halloween 2 out of the running.

Clearly, the guy just does not CARE about what the horror community thinks of him.  His Halloween series is being roundly castigated by both critics and audiences alike who are staying away in droves large enough to make M. Night Shyamalan look like Steven Spielberg.

But now…oh man.  He’s got plans for his NEXT movie, and horror buffs, brace yourselves…you’re not going to like them one iota.  His next movie will be a remake–specifically, The Blob.

Okay, this by itself might not be considered bad news.  I mean, so what?  So what if The Blob ALREADY had a remake over twenty years ago?  He’s ROB ZOMBIE, man!  He doesn’t CARE about things like respecting canon or even simple logic!  He doesn’t have to, apparently.  Otherwise, he wouldn’t come out with statements like THIS:

“My intention is not to have a big red blobby thing — that’s the first thing I want to change. That gigantic Jello-looking thing might have been scary to audiences in the 1950s, but people would laugh now.”

…

Wow.

He wants to remake The Blob…by taking out THE BLOB.  What exactly is left?

If it’s like other Rob Zombie films–and I’m not the only ones to pick up on this–what’s left is rednecks, psychopaths, his wife, or any of the above combined.  That’s pretty much all the tools he’s got in his arsenal, and if all you’ve got is a hammer, I guess everything really DOES look like  a nail.

The ONLY way this can work is if he makes the Blob more active.  Now, that would be pretty awesome–if the Blob’s whipping out tendrils to engulf people, Venom symbiote style, that could be worthwhile.

But about the only way “worthwhile” and “Rob Zombie movie ” fit in the same sentence is if the word “not” is involved.

I knew, going in, that Rob Zombie’s second foray into the Halloween series was going to be godawful.  I’d seen the trailers.  I’d read the interviews.  It was common knowledge that a sequel almost never outperforms its predecessor and based on how bad the first one was, Rob Zombie was definitely not going to manage to pull off the brass ring of a superior sequel.

I knew it was going to be bad…but just how bad I couldn’t possibly know until I actually got in and watched the whole thing go skipping off merrily to hell itself.

First, of course, we must discharge the duty of a plot summary, as Laurie Strode will learn the truth about her origins and once again tangle with massive maniac Michael Myers.  Thankfully, that actually is most of the plot–leaves me more room to actually talk about the movie itself.

I had never left a theatre with such a massive hate-on as I had for this pile of steaming cinematic dung.   What Rob Zombie has done to the Halloween series, I would not do to a dead dog with leprosy.  He has managed to single-handedly destroy one of the great horror films of the twentieth century by systematically stripping and altering all of its greatest features and then loudly declaring the final work an improvement.

He took one of the world’s greatest nightmares–that one day, a little boy much like any you might find in any small town, would just snap for no clear reason and turn into a gruesome killing machine that would have so little connection to the world that he seems to feel no pain–and reduced him to a white trash child abuse case.

He managed to so thoroughly botch his iconography that he confused and conflated Michael Myers with Jason Voorhees, giving one the attachment of his mother where it was so clearly not supposed to be.

He managed to create an anachronistic time scale so horrendously confused it is impossible to properly tell what era we’re in, as The Moody Blues sing Nights in White Satin on a black and white television show in one scene while we watch a CNN-analogue on a flatscreen only a year later.  Is this the seventies again?  Are we in the twenty first century?  Who knows?

He even managed to thoroughly bungle the characters–Doc Loomis was never a fame-seeking status-chasing glory hound out to sell books.  Doc Loomis relentlessly blamed himself for his involvement with Michael Myers; to suggest otherwise is an insult so catastrophic as to be unparalleled.

Let me be abundantly clear on one critical point: Halloween II is a mockery.  A sham.  A miserable, hollow imitation so pale that the name is not worthy to be attached to it.  If I can keep just one person from handing over their hard-earned money to this horrendous con job of a film, I will have done good in the world sufficient to qualify me for sainthood.

I do make one point, though…had Zombie actually made this film, and its predecessor, using his own characters, he might have wound up with something worthwhile.  Nothing great, of course, but certainly not something that would inspire the kind of wrathful sorrow that this one does.  By attaching the Halloween name and characters to it, a grotesque travesty has taken place.  Had he taken Carpenter and Hill’s original title and dubbed his version The Babysitter Murders, I might well have been a little less horrified.

But this is not Halloween.  This is Rob Zombie’s ill-conceived, half-baked version that will give little joy to horror fans everywhere, especially those who remember the greatness of the Carpenter work.

Rob Zombie has torn apart the Mona Lisa to make a collage for Mommy.

The Screenhead Ten Scale spits on this empty husk of a great legacy and gives it a full one out of ten.  This insult must not go by unchallenged.

Zombie returns to Haddonfield for this Dimension Films sequel that finds the murderous psychopath Michael Myers (once again played by Tyler Mane) out on the loose again.  You can watch the film clip here or go to MSN and see the HD version.  Either way, it’s too scary for me to watch.

‘Halloween II’ Exclusive Clip: “Call 911!”