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Slickster

Friday The 13th (2009)

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It doesn't matter the cut, they're both good.

 

I put "get it" in quotes because it's not an issue of it going over your head in a strict sense, you either like what he has to offer or don't. It's not a bad script, and I liked that Michael Myers elicited sympathy. Really, much of what I liked about it was that I found it so easy to relate to on a personal level.

 

It's simply a matter of a difference in philosophy.

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Well for starters, if Rob Zombie wanted to make a movie about a sympathetic serial killer, then go-ahead make it, no one is stopping him, and hey I'd probably check it out myself.

 

However, why does he need to use "Halloween" as the vehicle to do this? The Michael Myers character was "pure evil" and was pretty fucking great the way it was originally intended.

 

I don't hate the remake, nor think everything about it is bad, but I do have a major problem with remakes that aren't keeping true to the source material.

 

Again, I repeat. No one said you can't make a movie about a sympathetic serial killer, but don't call it a remake of "Halloween" and don't use "Michael Myers" as the killer.

 

 

 

 

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No one said you can't make a movie about a sympathetic serial killer, but don't call it a remake of "Halloween" and don't use "Michael Myers" as the killer.

 

Why not? It clearly worked for some people.

 

Didn't he call it a "re-imagining" as opposed to a remake anyway?

 

I'm actually having a similar discussion with a friend of mine regarding this Friday the 13th remake. I always divorce a remake from the source material (to a reasonable extent). It's not like the remake makes the original go away, and the original doesn't make the remake any worse or better.

 

Why use Halloween? It had some good elements that he could make use of.

 

The same is true of the TCM remake and probably will be of this F13th remake. I love the originals as much as anyone, but they don't really change anything.

 

I'm aware that not everyone feels this way, as I have indeed had this discussion multiple times.

 

[And not for nothing, I didn't find Michael Myers completely unsympathetic in the original Halloween anyway.]

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Yeah, aren't there moments in the original series when he's going after somebody and they say something like "Michael?" and he gets all sentamental and pauses for a few moments giving them time to escape? I'm not that familiar with the series so I don't know which one it was, but I watched it on TV a couple months ago where he was chasing a little girl who was related to him and that happened.

 

I do like the Rob Zombie Halloween.

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He can just go back to living in Dream Land where he has his whole body.

 

Yeah, but a sequel would be pointless if the studio couldn't get the rights to other characters like Ash from Evil Dead, or Michael Myers.

 

They actually released the sequel, sort of, last year. The original script for the planned sequel with Ash was released in comic book form in a six part series. Was a really good read, IMO.

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I enjoyed half of Rob Zombie's Halloween. I thought the first half was an interesting different take on the Michael Myers character, but the thing is, once he escapes the asylum, the movie just becomes a very generic slasher film, and has a very annoying take on Laurie Strode. If the remake made the second half very similar to the original (focusing on scares rather than blood), I would have liked it much more. I do think Michael is WAY more effective if we know nothing about him, and why he is what he is, so thats another thing the remake had going against it too.

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Yeah I hated the Halloween remake. I liked the idea that Michael Myers was just an evil fucking kid who killed his sister for no reason. Now, he has a bad family life and it caused him to snap. What's next, blaming his anxiety medicine? It was an okay horror movie, but terrible 'remake'.

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Yeah I hated the Halloween remake. I liked the idea that Michael Myers was just an evil fucking kid who killed his sister for no reason. Now, he has a bad family life and it caused him to snap. What's next, blaming his anxiety medicine? It was an okay horror movie, but terrible 'remake'.

 

Agreed. Also I could care less for Rob Zombie's dialog, it's just the worst. If I was in the 5th grade I would have gotten a kick out of the stuff at the beginning of the movie at the breakfast fable. "Blah blah, I'll skull fuck you." But ok, whatever

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Yeah I hated the Halloween remake. I liked the idea that Michael Myers was just an evil fucking kid who killed his sister for no reason. Now, he has a bad family life and it caused him to snap. What's next, blaming his anxiety medicine? It was an okay horror movie, but terrible 'remake'.

 

Agreed. Also I could care less for Rob Zombie's dialog is just the worst. If I was in the 5th grade I would have gotten a kick out of the stuff at the beginning of the movie at the breakfast fable. "Blah blah, I'll skull fuck you." But ok, whatever

The dialog worked better in "The Devil's Rejects" (which is also a much better movie) because those characters are suppossed to be white trash killers. When I think of Michael Myers, "white trash" is the last thing that comes to mind.

 

Back on topic, it really looks like this is going to be a combination of "Friday the 13th" 1 & 2. That's a good thing, IMO.

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yeah, I like that idea. They can probably breeze through the backstory and some deal with mom, and then introduce Jason much sooner. Also popped for the pt 2 bag head. The pillowcase or whatever made him seem much more scary.

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I still think the scariest scene in any Friday movie is the shot from Part 2 where Survivor Girl is in Jason's shack, and you can see him barreling towards her through the open window for a good few seconds.

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Off topic but on the Michael Myers sympathy thing: He was simply an unstoppable evil destructive force with a logic known to him alone in the first film which is what I assume most fans are pointing to when speaking of original series. It isn't until the second less beloved film and much lesser later day sequels that semi-sympathetic tones were established to a mixed reaction, "The name calling/head tilt" and "sister twist." Even than he is still presented as an unreasoning killing machine for the most part.

 

"The dialog worked better in "The Devil's Rejects" (which is also a much better movie) because those characters are suppossed to be white trash killers. When I think of Michael Myers, "white trash" is the last thing that comes to mind."

 

Exactly. The Devils Rejects is by no means even a great genre movie but I think it is by far Rob Zombie's best effort. There is a good solid story buried underneath the usual Zombie crap and some very good performances.

 

 

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Oh fuck all the noise about the remake, that shit is TRASH. I HATE the remake. The original is a cinematic piece of art that inspired an entire genre. The remake was only good for Malcolm McDowell hamming it up for a few scenes.

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Wrong. That shit really happened. To me. It was a totally true to life depiction of an abusive upbringing melded with a fun slasher movie.

 

The thing being overlooked is that six year olds don't murder their sisters for no reason. Implying that he did is just boring and lazy. Why he did that bothered me for years... probably a lot of why I prefer the remake.

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I'm siding with Nighthawk. Love the original two movies, but I love the remake better.

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The thing being overlooked is that six year olds don't murder their sisters for no reason.

(I'm enjoying this discussion and wanted to clarify that I respect your opinion because I just accidentally wrote a long dissertation on Halloween)

 

See, I'd argue that, just like Rob Zombie, you kinda missed the whole point of Halloween in that death can be unpredictable, unexplainable, and happen at any time, no matter how young the victim is. Giving Michael an agenda is what ruined him in the remake AND every sequel. That's my biggest issue with the movie. I was excited to see Zombie at the helm originally. But if you want to remake Halloween, you cannot put the stupid sister angle into it.

 

I grew up in a post-Halloween world, but more importantly, the first five movies were canonized by the time I was discovering them. My point is, to my friends and I, Michael and Laurie were siblings and that was the driving force behind him; it was set in stone. Then, about two years ago, I broke out Halloween for the first time and watched it all alone (and I was high off my ass, too). It was an eye-opening experience. I was completely immersed in the movie to the point that I realized, to people watching it when it first came out*, the only reason Michael was after Laurie was because she had the misfortune of dropping off the key at his house (I'm guessing those people never went to check it out). Not only is that a pretty frightening concept, but it's the entire point of the movie.

 

Even John Carpenter knows it was stupid in retrospect and, as alluded to earlier, it led to things like Michael tilting his head like a confused dog rather than the creepy way he does it in the original. The fact that there was a chance to retcon us back to Michael's original conception, a remorseless, faceless, living embodiment of the Grim Reaper and they didn't take it is what gets me down on it.

 

That's why I like Friday the 13th so much. That's a fun slasher movie, not bogged down by family curses and that sort of ilk (I said, as I continued to never watch Jason Goes to Hell). I suppose that's why Halloween gets discussed even when you bring up FT13.

 

 

*Fun Side Story: My mother saw the original when she was in high school at the local drive-in and was so scared that she didn't wash her face when she got home because she was too scared to close her eyes.

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Valid points, but I'd say that Rob Zombie and myself didn't miss the point so much as dismiss it. Once again, I do love the original Halloween, but even watching it for the first time, when I was probably about six or seven myself, it seemed weird to me.

Sure, Michael is presented as a motiveless killing machine; that is, among other things, the function of Dr. Loomis in the story. It just always struck me that Loomis was wrong, and that just because we weren't informed of Michael's reasoning and motivation, doesn't mean he doesn't have them.

It appeared to me that Zombie was aware of this too, as he makes a point in his film of Loomis presenting the "pure evil" theory (and even writing an exploitative paperback about it, as a real shitty doctor would likely do), and then showing him to be wrong.

 

True enough, it's hard to separate the original Halloween by itself from the canon of the series, but even by itself, it was scary, but I never doubted his motivations. The sequels just gave me fairly poorly executed reasons for it. Zombie gave me better ones, and that, I suppose, is the basis for my preference of the remake: I've always been interested in the origins of dynamic and interesting characters (hell, my favorite character in Huckleberry Finn is Huck's father).

I know not everyone agrees with what I enjoy, so that's likely a lot of what splits people over this.

 

That said, I'm still more attached to Friday the 13th as a series than any individual Halloween.

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Right, but Zombie didn't "explore" Michael Myer's origin, he just kind of changed it and made it up how he see fit, which I guess yes, you can call a re-imagining, but then I ask once again, why a Halloween remake, rather then just your own original screenplay/script about a serial killer with a fucked up childhood?

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Surely Rob Zombie's version was preferable to just getting another sequel.

 

Carpenter himself told Zombie to "make it his own", which clearly he did. Our philosophies here are totally different Mike, as I say if you're going to remake something, you'd better change a lot of it, otherwise what's the point? Granted, that begs the response "don't do a remake" but they really don't bother me like they do some people. Particularly for horror movies. It's what the genre does.

Just look at the remakes as a new kind of sequel, if it helps.

 

Like, Rob Zombie "remade" Texas Chainsaw Massacre and called it House of 1000 Corpses. I happen to really like Rob Zombie as a filmmaker, but I know he's no auteur. I just like the way he handles the constant rehashing and such that horror and especially slashers do. (And yes, Devil's Rejects was his best effort).

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And yes, Devil's Rejects was his best effort

This we can agree on. I'm actually looking forward to his next one ("Tyrannosaurus Rex") because it looks like he's going back to the grimy pseudo-exploitation feel of "Rejects."

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Im actually looking forward to the 3-D release of Part III more than this (same week), although the only difference in the release vs others already out is the 3-D version.

 

Say what? They are releasing the 3-D version of Friday part 3? More info please!!!!

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Like, Rob Zombie "remade" Texas Chainsaw Massacre and called it House of 1000 Corpses. I happen to really like Rob Zombie as a filmmaker, but I know he's no auteur. I just like the way he handles the constant rehashing and such that horror and especially slashers do. (And yes, Devil's Rejects was his best effort).

 

Rob Zombie is a great art director and that's about the only kind of directing he's been good at, IMO.

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It doesn't matter the cut, they're both good.

I will say I thought the regular theatrical version was better than the unrated/workprint one. The rape escape and cop ending were both fairly inferior to the alternatives.

 

They're re-releasing F13 Part 3 in 3-D? Well, that would be just about the only reason to see it. What a bad movie. Let's face it, the vast majority of the old Friday the 13th series was total mediocrity, even by slasher-horror standards.

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3 is probably the second worst Jason movie, after Goes to Hell, but I wouldn't say the vast majority of them were mediocre.

 

Out of 11 movies, I'd call 5 of them good (1, 4, 7, X, vs F), 6 is above average and only 2 and 5 are mediocre.

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I thought I was the only one on Earth that liked JASON X.

 

Then again, with Jason being my favorite horror icon, next to the zombie/ghoul, I would go to see a movie with Jason just sitting there knitting a sweater.

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