It's Robert Zombie's remake of Halloween, with a million times more bloody kills, cuss words and Sherri Moon butts. You're gonna love it, unless you hate it.

Well I'm all set to loathe this movie within the first ten minutes; the comically overdone opening sequence of little Mikey's trashy, disfunctional home life had me all joining the chorus of "go to hell Zombie!...freak". It's an irritating scene and set up Michael Myers as just another troubled product of his environment serial killer. I have to say though, this is one of the rare times when a movie sort of brought me back after having first offended my delicate sensibilities, and I'll tell you that story right here.

A lot of people hate, and I mean hate this movie. Hate it in a personal way, far beyond mere distain for an inferior product. It took something they love religiously and made it dance for sweaty dollar bills in a strip joint. And I can't argue with that. If you're a diehard Halloween purist you have every right to just want to knock Mr Zombie's little cowboy hat off and tell him to take a damn bath.

I think the primary reason this movie is reviled is in the personification of Michael Myers. It takes the tack of letting us get to know and at least somewhat understand Mikey. A goodly portion of the film depicts his childhood, and he even has spoken lines for god's sake. This (blasphemously) contrasts the original in which Michael was simply a force of primal, inscrutable evil. He was The Shape, whereas in this he's at least to some degree human.

There's nothing wrong with that per se. You can do a story about some effed up kid with masks, and I could buy the "perfect storm" explanation for his behaviour. A movie like that can be correct, it's just not going to trip like Halloween. For me the trick to not hate the movie is to completely separate it from the original. I mean nobody else can ever be Doctor Loomis, and it's pure coincidence that girl's named Laurie Strode, and this killer independently selected the Shatner mask 'cause Shatner's just scary, and there's probably more than one town called Haddonfield. It's not Halloween. Not even a remake. I'm plugging my ears and humming. It's some other slasher movie they called "Halloween" in order to get funding.

It's not hard to see where the movie spent its money - good lord the cameos are flying at you like dodgeballs. I can't even remember them all. In addition to the whole Zombie posse I know I saw Udo Keir, Danny Trejo, Ken Foree, Brad Dourif, Clint Howard, and a bunch of other "that guy" character actors who's names escape me. And the winner is: Ken Foree. What a great scene. Only man to ever upstage Michael Myers during a kill.

So I'm saying this is just a pure 100% slasher movie and if I think of it as nothing other than that I'm fine. We don't get many watchable slashers anymore and this is packed with quality kills and has guys like Ken Foree instead of a bunch of loathsome jackasses like just about every other slasher movie made this century. At the end of the day, I think the best way to describe this movie is to squint a bit and say "yyyyyyyeah, I guess you could do it that way".

Oh! You know who could be Doctor Loomis? Angela Pleasance!

"I shot him SIX TIMES!"