Halloween

Rob Zombie continues to impress with his polished visual aesthetic. However, this film -- his third, with "House of 1000 Corpses" and "The Devil's Rejects" -- still shows room for growth in the narration department. He has stories to tell, and they tend to be ugly rather than scary, brutal rather than shocking. But when the only redeemable characters tend to be extras, and the main characters are soulless killers, it's hard to find a way to appreciate what he's trying to accomplish.

It starts as a promising exploration of evil, with Michael hiding his true self behind his masks and his psychiatrist (Malcolm McDowell) struggling to understand. However, once Michael breaks out of prison to track down his sister, the only person in his family he didn't kill at the beginning, the movie becomes like any other horror film out there. In this latter half, Zombie might have been better off breaking further away plotwise from John Carpenter's original. Since he was pretty faithful to it -- except for a few notable sequences -- there wasn't much interesting about it to those who had seen Carpenter's film.