9/5/07: Halloween/Death Sentence (2007)In retrospect, we outdid the baby-boomer media in obsessing over the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love. Sorry about that. The good news is that we’ll wrap up that obsession with Friday’s entry. The better news is that the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love ended with two death-dealing right-wing films playing at the multiplexes—although, sadly, at opposite ends of the box-office tally.
Rob Zombie’s
Halloween is a pretty tough call as entertainment. We enjoyed it as a typical film from the rock-star-turned-director, but reasonable fans could be disappointed. The important thing is Zombie’s remake of the 1978 slasher film makes a valuable point that’s missing from his two earlier works.
House of 1,000 Corpses was good grindhouse fun, and
The Devil’s Rejects was a superior sequel that was also a great western. Both of these grueling gorefests, however, had a challenging moralistic manner. (Our insightful review of
The Devil’s Rejects is
here.)
Halloween, however, is where Zombie takes a major step from the Hollywood mentality. A lot of people are
upset at how Zombie has given a detailed back story to the series’ previously vague villain. The original
Halloween presented us with young Michael Myers as a boyhood killer turned silent presence. Zombie wants us to really know the guy—and you know what screwed Myers up? His sister was a slut and his mother was a stripper.
That’s a big leap from
Halloween’s original suburban setting. Still, how brave was that of Zombie? Any other director would’ve had the young kid learning how to kill from a copy of the King James Bible while his prim mother endlessly lectured him on the evils of sex. Zombie’s willing to create a more believable world where a sociopathic upbringing actually raises a sociopath.
Also, you get to enjoy a condensed revisiting of the evolution of Dr. Loomis—originally played by Donald Pleasance, and nicely revamped here by Malcolm McDowell. Zombie gives us Loomis as a mild-mannered type who eventually accepts the wisdom of grabbing a gun and wearing the same trench coat that Pleasance made iconic. We’d go into more detail, but we don’t want to spoil the film. It’s just nice to be reminded of how brilliant Pleasance was as the homicidal shrink who’d grown to accept the presence of evil. Let’s also mention that Pleasance would later do his own turn as a batty do-gooder psychiatrist in
Alone In The Dark.
Halloween was a big Labor Day hit, of course.
Death Sentence bombed. The critics mainly treated this revenge fantasy as a warm-up for goofing on Jodie Foster in the upcoming
The Brave One (which,
as noted, might be a fine vigilante epic in its own right). Bad reviews couldn’t undo the impact of a stark ad campaign, though, featuring Kevin Bacon brandishing a dripping baseball bat under the tagline, “Protect What’s Yours.”
We’d have been happy if that bat was dripping the blood of some kid who’d tried to steal Bacon’s hubcaps. As it turns out, Bacon is playing an executive who’s seen his teenage son murdered as part of a gang initiation. He vows that
all must die in the grand vigilante spirit, and that’s good viewing.
Death Sentence is worth recommending just for a parking garage scene that salutes both ’70s actioners and Bacon’s earlier turn as a stockbroker/bike messenger in
Quicksilver.
The film’s more morally sound than we should expect from the director of
Saw. It’s certainly what we should expect from a film with such a proud pedigree as
Death Wish. (The source novel by Brian Garfield was the official sequel to the book that spawned the Charles Bronson hit.) We’re also happy to go along with
Death Sentence’s less-believable aspects—although critics should note that interracial gangs aren’t really laughable anymore, unless you’re talking about creeps like Crips, Bloods, or MS-13.
Death Sentence mainly works because of two important scenes. The first is where Bacon is blithely informed that his son’s murderer might serve a whole five years in prison. Sadly, that’s the most realistic element in the script. Then there’s the ending. It’s hardly a SPOILER to reveal that Bacon does, in fact, kill them all. There’s just a nice twist where the action slows at the end, while Bacon wraps things up in a perfectly reasonable manner. It’s kind of subtle for this right-wing double-feature, but we can handle subtle sometimes.
Make it your own: Both are playing in theaters now—as seen at the
Halloween and
Death Sentence sites—but
Death Sentence is more in need of financial support. If you’re in an urban area, it’s okay to pick up bootleg DVDs of
Halloween. You might get a nice-looking alternative cut that’s making the rounds.
