By Robert Dixter Aug 27, 2009, 16:33 GMT
Rob Zombie has been making quite a name for himself in the horror world. A much better name than say Michael Bay, who supposedly shot footage of Megan Fox washing a car at his house as an audition for Transformers. Zombie has been getting great reviews for his films including Devil’s Rejects and Halloween, and by great reviews I mean internet geeks who actually watch horror films have been posting nice things as opposed to Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum who are looking for the next great Lars Von Trier to put them to sleep.
Now I’m not a huge horror fan, I usually spend my time watching Bridget Jones with the kids and Care Bear films with the missus, but I enjoy the classics and can appreciate a well made movie regardless of the genre. Zombie had a huge opening weekend when he re-imagined Halloween in 2007. I didn’t really understand the need to remake a classic like Halloween which essentially gave birth to the modern slasher film, but I don’t run a studio and didn’t have a say in it. Now Zombie has made a sequel.
This is where I get confused. He made a sequel to a film that was a remake of a film that already had a sequel. This is about as confusing as Lindsay Lohan’s sexual orientation. Zombie’s Halloween 2 is not a remake of the original sequel. Zombie, who also wrote the script, claims it’s a brand new story (but from existing characters) about Mike Myers and why he wants to keep making Shrek movies. Why doesn’t Zombie just make an original horror movie? He clearly knows how to. The answer is because someone else would have made Halloween II anyway, so it might as well be him since he put all the work and effort into the first one. But Rob, wasn’t that you working off of somebody else’s film anyway? So now Zombie feels protective of a franchise he created which was a rip off of somebody (John Carpenter) else’s franchise.
But let’s give Zombie some credit. It seemed that after the original Halloween 2 John Carpenter gave up on the franchise and they just released bad horror movies with the name Halloween in the title (Season of the Witch?). So maybe it was in need of a reboot. Texas Chainsaw remade the 1974 horror film in 2003 and then released a sequel in 2006 which was a prequel. That might be even more confusing than the current Halloween set up since the original Tobe Hooper Texas Chainsaw had its own string of sequels before the remake showed up with a prequel as sequel.
So now that the new Halloween has a sequel does that mean we should ignore all the previous sequels from the original? Does what happened in the original run not count in the new franchise? Basically, I think there are too many questions surrounding remakes and their sequels that going to see them in the theater would actually make my brain hurt more than when I tried to read Pam Anderson’s novel “Star”.
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