Rob Zombie didn’t remake the horror classic Halloween, he created his own interpretation and has presented an entirely new story by keeping the basic plot intact and adding some extra surprises and a whole lot of history. Obviously John Carpenter and Rob Zombie have entirely different styles, so it’s hard to compare this film to the original. As it stands on its own, Halloween 2007 wasn’t too bad, but it was forgettable and won’t come close to having the kind of impact the original has had on horror audiences around the world.

We all know the original story: Michael Meyers kills his sister on Halloween one night when he is 10-years-old. After he is put into a mental institution and studied by Doctor Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) for 15 years, he escapes one night and goes on a killing spree while trying to find his younger sister, Laurie.

The 2007 version makes things a little different from the beginning. First of all, young Michael (Daeg Faerch) has a penchant for torturing animals, and the film opens on him playing with a pet rat. Also, Michael’s less than savory home life is explored a little bit too. His mother (Sheri Moon) is a stripper, and her boyfriend is a lewd drunk who likes to scream at Michael and make fun of him constantly. After Michael gets into some trouble in school and the principal suggests a psychological evaluation, Michael runs out and brutally kills a classmate who has tortured him in the past, then goes home and kills his sister Judith (Hannah Hall), his mother’s horrible boyfriend, and his sister’s boyfriend.

I could have enjoyed an entire film solely about Michael’s childhood, but Zombie chose to keep the original plot, with a few extra scares, extra gore and of course, more nudity. The general plot is the same though, Michael is after his little sister Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton), and Dr. Loomis is trying to find him before he kills anymore people. That part of the plot was pretty much kept intact, but Zombie’s interpretation of the ending was totally different and it wasn’t bad, but I didn’t enjoy it all that much.

I understand why Zombie did things the way he did though. As a director he is all about shock value, and if he had made a film that was faithful to the original, nobody would watch it. Seeing Michael Meyers’ face, hearing him speak and giving him a human side as a small boy was an interesting tactic on Zombie’s part and I could tell that Zombie is very passionate about the original Halloween, so this interpretation of it has apparently come from years of watching Halloween films and wondering what inspired the character of Michael and what that character’s thought processes may have been.

I really liked a lot of things that Zombie did with this film - in fact, my favorite little trivia item about the original film is that Jamie Lee Curtis’ hair changes from curly to straight in almost every scene, and the same happened with the young woman who played Laurie in this film - and I loved that Zombie paid attention to quirky little details like that. However, there were some big things that made the film not so great. part of the brilliance of the first film is in its casting and the talent of that cast. Zombie has some work to do on that, and every single performance in this film was atrocious. The other thing that made Halloween so groundbreaking was its use of sound as an element for striking fear in an audience - not necessarily excessive violence, cheap thrills, or gore - another lesson Zombie could have learned from the original and taken to heart.

If somebody were going to make an attempt at a Halloween tribute film, I’m glad it was Rob Zombie. It’s obvious that he is the ultimate superfan and has a deep admiration for the original film. He didn’t try to improve upon it at all, but instead, gave us his own interpretation and a new way of looking at Michael Meyers. If Zombie tries another project like this, I highly recommend finding better actors so that he doesn’t have to resort to covering their awful performances in gore to get screams from the audience.