Screenhead

The Chiller Eyegore Awards, part of the Halloween Horror Nights festival (we just finished a couple weeks ago covering all the various short films that will be involved in the proceedings) just announced a couple of its special guest appearances.

If you ever wanted the chance to see the embodiment of a franchise and a complete disaster in filmmaking in the flesh, you’ll get your chance at the Chiller Eyegore Awards as both Tobin Bell and Rob Zombie will be making appearances.

The contrast is impressive, of course–with the representative of a major flagship title that’s only starting to look a bit long in the tooth (let’s face it, after six installments ANYTHING starts to look a BIT frayed around the edges.  Don’t get me wrong–I enjoyed Saw V plenty, but the point remains) standing alongside a guy whose career never really produced much but fake blood and bombast.

Still, it should be an interesting show, no matter how it ends up.

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!”

Every time…EVERY TIME!…I see something with Rob Zombie’s name on it I’m torn as to whether or not the appropriate response is to break down weeping or fly into a blind rage.

And I had that same horrible conflicted reaction tonight when I got a look at the disaster he’s going to make out of Halloween 2.  Seems there’s a trailer that no one’s really been using yet, and there’s a good reason for it.  It’s going to show, conclusively, the absolute HASH Zombie’s about to make out of one of the three biggest horror icons of the twentieth century.

It’s over here, if you want to take a look at it–keep your eye out for such horrible concepts as “Do As Mother Says, Jaso–uhhh…I mean, MICHAEL” and “Suddenly Doc Loomis Is A Self-Righteous Pedantic Moron Instead of a Self Loathing Hero”.

The worst of it was, as I watched that trailer, I was actually beginning to reconsider.  Maybe, just maybe, the Broken Clock Theory would spring in and save Rob Zombie’s wreck of a career.  And I was almost looking forward to see it when the last thirty seconds kicked in and shot that clear to hell.

All I know is, we’re gonna have a GRAND old time when the movie comes out.

In more casting news, Chase Wright Vanek is now on set in Georgia shooting scenes as the new young Michael Myers in Rob Zombie’s Halloween sequel. Margot Kidder (Superman) has also joined the film’s cast; she will play Larue Strode’s therapist Barbara Collier.

Vanek replaces Daeg Faerch who apparently grew to a height taller than Sheri Moon since the last film was released.

Zombie’s sequel is dubbed H2 and is due out later this year.

The Halloween 2 news keeps coming, as Rob Zombie sent out word that he is bringing back Mark Christopher Lawrence to reprise his role as “Deputy King a member of the Haddonfield police force.”

Lawrence can be seen recently on NBC’s Chuck; he also appeared in Heroes.

Zombie is currently in pre-production on the upcoming sequel, hoping to start principal photography on February 23.

Jeffrey Daniel Phillips, Tyler Mane and Ezra Buzzington also star.

Rob Zombie will be back with the Halloween series this August, as Dimension Films has announced that H2, the direct sequel to the director’s 2007 remake of the horror classic, will be released on August 28.

The original opened on August 31, 2007 and set a new record for the four-day Labor Day holiday weekend with $30.6 million. August would have seen the release of Zombie’s Tyrannosaurus Rex, which has now been pushed back due to H2.

The sequel will pick up immediately after the first movie ended and will follow the aftermath o Michael Myers’ murderous rampage. Shooting begins this March.

From Arrow in the Head comes word that Dimension is moving forward with a sequel to Rob Zombie’s Halloween without the involvement of the director. Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, who were attached to the Hellraiser remake, have been confirmed to be the film’s co-directors.

“Our vision will be done with the utmost respect, with continuity to Zombie’s work,” said Maury. “But also a real evolution of the world he set in place.”

No further details on the sequel are available.