In this, their seventy-fourth episode, join Jesse and Rian as they discuss:
- The wrong side of the law
- Anchorbird
- What comic books we've been reading lately
- Taking care of your valuables
- Remembering the dead
- Does Captain America need to be reborn?
- Conquest the dick
- What we've been watching lately in and out of the theater
- Michael Myers: Then & Now
- George Romero Zombies: Then & Now
- Jason Vorhees: Then & Now
- Rian defends Frank Miller's The Spirit (sort of...)
- Zach Galifianakis: The Movie
- The triumphant return (yet again) of Futurama
- Mickey Rourke as...Mickey Rourke
- More Alien prequel ruminations
- J.J. Abrams news
- This week in trailers: Shutter Island, Whiteout
- Jumping into the world of Potter
...and multiple other topics. Come along, won't you, as Jesse and Rian get Sidetracked.
This Podcast May Include Some Explicit Language
...It Also Most Likely Contains Some Spoilers
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Episode 74 Song List:
Born And Raised - Alexisonfire
Battle For The Sun - Placebo
At The Bottom Of The Sea - The Thermals
The Party (Oh, My God!) - Wild Light
The Thief - The Dear Hunter
Hold That Sound - Moneen
Curbside Goodbye - Emery
Happy Birthday Don't Die - Rhett Miller
Smoking - Story Of The Sea
Quiet Little Voices - We Were Promised Jetpacks
Bleeding Voice - Leona Lewis
I'll Be With You - Black Lips
Rock-N-Roll Victim - Death
Hide - Jihae
Human - Civil Twilight
Before Telling Dragons - Karl Blau
The Northern - Alexisonfire
Come Undone - Placebo
Son - The Dear Hunter
I Let It Go - The Thermals
Call Home - Wild Light
Madness! - Moneen
In Shallow Seas We Sail - Emery
Refusing Temptation - Rhett Miller
God Only Knows 64 - PDF Format
Housefire - Bell
Everything With You - The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart
Caskets - Damien Jurado
We Are Rockstars - Does It Offend You, Yeah?
why Halloween 2007 is a crime against humanity. By Joel Lolar. part 1 spoilers like mad to follow.
ReplyDeletethe fact that rian enjoyed the 07 halloween more then the 1978 classic was so enraging to me I actually punched a total stranger in the face while listening to this episode.
there are things so incredibly bad in the remake you would swear I was making it up. I'm not, I wish I was.
The original opens up with the classic John carpenter score, the halloween theme one of the best and creepiest themes of all time. it fades to black and informs us that it is halloween night 1963 and there are some creepy kids chanting some halloween rhyme. The myers house looks like something you would find in any american suburb. a quint little two story house.
rob zombies has the black screen opens up with "destroyer" by kiss. The myers house looks like a larry the cable guy yard sale. I was expecting a car up on blocks, hell it might be there at this point I was rolling my eyes so much I was dizzy.
Michael myers.
original- like rian mentioned 6 year old myers only appears in the first five minutes of the movie and only appears on camera for about 30 seconds of that, the rest of his "screen time" is a POV shot as he murders his sister. His mother and father find him in the walkway with a dazed look on his face as he holds the bloody kitchen knife. At one point during the murder he actually looks at the knife as if he is unable to completely comprehend what is going on. Young Myers is screwed in the head plain and simple...we know nothing else about him or his family other then the brief glimpse we are given here. This works all we need to know is myers is disturbed the reasons why dont matter. he grows up to be thin, lengthy not that big or physically imposing. He escapes after letting all the other inmates out and stealing loomis car. it's a bit much that he steals a car or knows how to drive. I'll give ya that.
remake- we meet the myers family during breakfast, they all look dirty and greasy Just like everyone in zombie's movies. it's as if all his movies take place in an alternate dimension where soap hasn't been invented, its supposed to be chicago and everyone looks like they are in a trailer park in reno nevada. Ronnie, Mrs. myers dead beat wheel chair bound boyfriend, throws things, calls little Michael a queer and complements the 17 year old daughter on her wonderful pooter. We meet young micheal as he is killing one of his pet rats, ronnie or the sister implies that micheal is banging them, which he of course he denies...there is yelling, baby screaming and swearing and lots of redneckary but no of it adds up to anything. Sherri Moon zombie is horrible, she is easily the worst actress on the planet, miley cyris would have been more believable in the role. its no mystery that with the exception of the 04 film toolbox murders and she has only appeared in her husbands movies.
part II
ReplyDeletelittle mikey goes to school where of course no one understands him, his mom is a stripper, he has long hair and he's into kiss. so automatically he is an outcast. He yells at a principle and gets sent to the office. Where Dr. loomis enters and tells sherri moon that micheal is killing animals and carrying dead cats in his backpack. she doesnt believe him. Mickey kills the school bully with a log. sherri has to go strip at her go go club and before leaving tells micheal that his cat killing days are over...starting tomorrow. she leaves, ronnie is drunk and watching movies and his sister is to busy banging her equally grunge boyfriend to take him. this results is a wonderful montage of Mike sad on the porch cause he cant go trick or treating spliced in with his mother stripping to "Love hurts" it's laughable. mikey kills in this order...ronnie (whom he tied to a chair with tape) dirty boyfriend, and sis...who in one of the most laughable scenes...micheal dons the classic mask and follows her down the hallway...just to recap he's a little kid with an adult sized mask on...he looks like the leprechaun or some random angry midget. he leaves the baby alone cause he loves it.
my biggest problem with this, is with the original it's played that myers is demented and he snapped. zombie loses that effect with the premeditated murders of four people. five if you count the nurse he kills while in treatment although that seems to be more spur of the moment then the others. The original only gives a little bit of the "treatment" mostly to introduce dr. sam loomis and for good reason, the remake tries to get into what makes him tick and what we find out is what makes Myers tick...is boring. He thinks he's ugly, he likes mask and he doesnt like to be ignored. also his Loomis (played by Malcolm Mcdonald) comes off as a douche. he wrote a book about mike and speaks at a school, doesnt that seem against doctor /patient relationship? after the last killing He stops talking and sherri moon mercifully shoots herself in the computer. he grows up to be Tyler mane. who is gigantic. 6'10 and 275 lbs with long greasy hair and built like a sherman tank. in retrospect maybe weight training not the best idea for a crazy killer in the psychic ward? myers smashes the gaurds escorting him with his chains and handcuffs and drags their bloody corpse down a hallway before killing danny trejo with a tv and escaping the nut house in slippers, a pumpkin mask and a bathrobe.
how do they get their trademark gear? 78- myers kills a tow truck driver (off screen) steals his jumpsuit and steals a mask from a store. klepto?remake- Myers in bathrobe, slippers and pumpkin mask goes to a well populated truck stop and kills Big Joe Grizzley played by ken foree from dawn of the dead. by smashing him into the bathroom stale. did I mention he was pooping and reading a porn mag at the time. He steals his jumpsuit which is all greasy and dirty looking, also its pooh brown. The mask was buried under some floor boards in his house, which of course... makes it all greasy and dirty looking.
part 3"season of the witch"
ReplyDeletethe meat and potatoes
78- Laurie strode drops keys off at the old myers house, unbeknownst to her the escaped michael is inside. He begins to stalk her and her friends for no other reasons then because he is a loose crazy man and he has nothing else to do.
remake- Laurie strode is Michael's baby sister from the beginning all grown up and adopted. some how having not seen her since she was an infant, micheal knows that this is her and wants to reunite and or kill her. He kills her parents and her friends, in once scene he dresses up in the girls boyfriends halloween costume, just like in the original! only this time it doesnt make any sense...not only is tyler mane the size of two of her boyfriends but up until this point he has smashed in doors and slammed peoples faces into bloody chicklets? why all of a sudden would he play this one sly ? zombie breaks any rules that he himself has set up for his Michael. and puts it in only because it was in the original.
the sister stuff wasn't introduced until the 1981 sequel Halloween two.(or at least the 1980 2 hour television cut of part one, in which they hint at some relationship between the two of them) The original is better because of the lack of motive. for some reason zombie decides to put in the elements from the sequels that only went on to water down the franchise and make it train wrecks that the later sequels became. having to explain the ending of his blood line and all that cult stuff just added unneeded elements. one could argue that it didn't need seven sequels. Friday the 13th has more but none of them are that good, so there wasnt much of a pedestal for them to fall off of. The end of the orginal is the best ending in all of slasher movies. the stuff with Laurie and michael in the house is handled way better. zombie replaces the famous closet scene with michael myers smashing the ceiling with a giant 2x 4 until laurie strode falls out like a pinata and he smashes her off a balcony and onto the pattio furniture or something. Laurie shoots him in the face... the end. the end because rob hates sequels and wasnt interested in making one...until the movie studio drove a brinks truck up to his door and said sherri moon could come back and be a ghost or something in H2.
at no point does the remake come close to the original. zombie can't do it better, so He just does it louder. I don't know how you can say the original is boring. at times the remake feels like a parody of the original.
To me the original Halloween is a classic and the definitive "slasher" movie, zombies take on the franchise is a monster truck rally, complete with drunken raciest red necks spilling beer on the children in front of them as gravedigger crush them cars real good.
la fin.
@ Joel:
ReplyDeleteBest comment ever.
I could go through your laundry list of complaints about Zombie's movie one by one and respond to them all, but I think it will serve me better just to reiterate that I don't like the original Halloween. I find it boring. I also don't think it's scary in the least, which is not to say that I think zombie's version is either. I just didn't find anything in the original to like.
Now, that's just me. I love horror movies, but I've always been a monster movie guy and not a slasher movie guy. This is pretty obvious considering that I'm 24 years old and I just watched the original Friday The 13th for the first time ever a week ago. You've obviously got a lot more invested in not only the slasher genre than me, but this movie which you've loved for a long time.
To put it into context, I feel the same way about Carpenter's The Thing as you do about Carpenter's Halloween: I can't believe that you didn't like it/found it boring because in my eyes it's one of the best, most effective monster movies (or just plain movies) ever made. Sorry to bring it back to that all-too-familiar Joel/Rian territory, but I think it perfectly sums up the Halloween argument.
As for Zombie's version of Halloween, I'll never say that it's a feat in directing, but I do think that it's the best of Zombie's films, which is partially why I was so taken with it. I expected to hate the movie as much as I did House Of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, especially considering that it's a remake of a movie that I already didn't like. What Zombie brought to the table for me was a movie that didn't bore me.
I'm all for mystery and the whole "the less you see, the scarier it is" philosophy that many good horror movies cling to, but sometimes I just wanna see a massacre. I mean, this is a "slasher" movie. I wanna see the slashing. So yeah, the Ken Foree scene in the truck stop bathroom was ridiculous, but I loved seeing Foree play such a wacky character, and I got to see a savage beating. As you mention, in the original the death is offscreen, but for whatever reason in the case of this film I preferred it onscreen.
An example:
Alien is a horror movie with a lot of mystery. There's a monster we don't know much about and it's got a great mood, so not seeing much of the actual killing serves a great purpose and keeps the tension high.
Aliens is more of an action movie wherein we already know what the monsters look like and what they're capable of, so there's no need to hide the killing anymore, and they don't.
In Halloween I personally don't care much about the mystery. I mean, we know the guy under the mask is a man (or at least I guess we do...why Michael is inhuman and was able to come back in multiple sequels doesn't make much sense to me), so what's the big mystery? Furthermore, it's a man with a knife. We know what we're in for, just lemme see it. Along those same lines, since I'm not really interested in the mystery here (because as far as I'm concerned, there's not much mystery to be had in this situation) I was glad to see so much back story with Michael because he now feels like a more fleshed-out character to me. I'm glad that he had motives this time around because it didn't make the events of the plot seem so pointless.
I guess all that ranting just goes to further explain my opinion that the original Halloween is boring and that's why I didn't like it. By the same token, Zombie's Halloween isn't boring (in my opinion), and gave me more of what I wanted to see: beatings, stabbings, and general bloodshed.
what zombie did to myers is the equivalent of remaking Jaws and giving the shark the ability to fly.
ReplyDeleteif you haven't maybe you should check out the Halloween 2 (1981) it might give you more of what you crave as kind of like with aliens, we already know Myers so they get right into the blood shed. The movie opens up immediately after the first one ends. frankly its the only good sequel. since it came out in the 80's the slasher flick was going pretty well at that point with friday the 13th being released in 1980 and part 2 in 81. The violence is amped up and they add some of that slasher gore. Halloween 2 might actually have my favorite Myers scene in it and a fitting end to the series if you dare not venture any further. although the ending to part four (1988) and the beginning of part five (1989) need to be seen to be believed. and not in a good way more in a "really thats the best you can come up with" sort of way.
halloween 2 was meant to be the ending of myers story. hence Halloween 3:season of the witch which is an entirely new halloween themed horror movie, involving evil mask. Carpenter and company envisioned the halloween franchise to be a series of unrelated movies. Halloween 3 was not well received and Myers returned in 1988s fittingly titled Halloween 4 the return of Michael Myers. oddly enough the actress who played annie in the remake played Laurie strodes 10 year old Daughter in parts 4 and 5,being stalked by her famous uncle. in part five she gains the magic abilities to see her uncles killings. as was the theme at the time as both her and the main heroine in 1988's friday the 13th part seven:the new blood gained superpowers. needless to say it was a little strange to see her naked in the remake.
as for myers super human abilities he gains along the way...the only thing even resembling a reason is because he is "pure evil" go figure. That to me is the difference betwen the fridays and the halloweens....friday the 13th embraced the cheese and ran with it...halloween always was grasping at the dignity of the original, well making cheesy slasher flicks.
I don't get the flying Jaws reference, because the Michael Myers in Zombie's version wasn't really any more formidable than he was in the original. In fact, the Michael Myers in the original was more supernatural than the new one because he disappeared at the end after supposedly dying. After seeing the trailer for the new Rob Zombie Halloween 2, however, it seems like he's going down the same "magical" path that the original series took as well.
ReplyDeleteI knew that stuff about the original Halloween sequels. I will have to give the second one a try based on your recommendation, though.
In closing, don't I at least get a little credit for liking the original Friday The 13th more than the remake?
sure and you were right about jason not getting the hockey mask until part 3d so bonus points all around.while doing some research for my triad i found the years of release for the friday the 13ths 80,81, 82, 84,85, 86, 88, 89 thats all the paramount movies new line took over and released final friday in the 90's. but man they went nutty with them movies.
ReplyDeletein a funny turn of events I wish that Jason had been portrayed more like zombies' Myers. I always thought Jason was the more physical and myers more stealthy.
You guys talk about Anchorbird in this one? Now I have to listen to it.
ReplyDelete