ROB ZOMBIE TRICKS AUDIENCES, GETS A TREAT

Lame headline, I know. Moving on…
Never mind that critics and fans alike have skewered Rob Zombie’s remake of Halloween – the damn thing made $31 million dollars in four days, giving it the biggest Labor Day opening weekend of all time.

For my part, I’ll say that it is, indeed, a pretty bad movie – although I think that anyone who calls it “the worst movie of the year” hasn’t sat through Ghost Rider. Mostly, I think Zombie just made a series of well-intentioned but ultimately extremely misguided choices – like, uh, Malcolm McDowell’s incredibly silly looking hair piece. And while I don’t know how much this movie cost to make, I’d wager Zombie’s record breaking opening weekend has secured at least eight more sequels for this tired franchise (for those counting at home, this is the ninth film in the series, which is pretty impressive, until you realize that there are eleven Jason/Friday the 13th flicks with a twelfth in the works and that they’re currently in pre-production on the 22nd entry in the James Bond series). In any case, Zombie recently signed a two picture deal with Dimension, the company behind Halloween. Here’s hoping he uses those opportunities to make something a little more interesting.

-AR