User blog comment:MeltingLizard/Rob Zombie's Halloween/@comment-26030957-20150724003412

I agree with you one hundred percent, Lizard.

Rob Zombie is a genius filmmaker. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the original as well; I just sort of see Zombie's version as a postmodern ode to the first. The guy is obviously a huge fan. I once saw his house on that old show Cribs and it was filled with framed, vintage horror movie posters.

Zombie's style is fantastic, obviously heavily influenced by late seventies slasher films such as Texas Chainsaw, The Hills Have Eyes, and Last House on the Left. The camera angles and lighting, the way he focuses on close-ups of the eyes of the characters; but he combines these iconic images with an MTVish type of comic-booky glitz that I find utterly enthralling. Have you ever watched them both back to back? There are several scenes, like Loomis talking with the sheriff, that are line for line, shot for shot duplicates of the original. And the music?! Opening with Kiss, then when Micheal steps towards that truck stop and Rush's Tom Sawyer comes blaring out. Whoa. And the Misfits playing during that make-out sequence in the beginning? Zombie uses music so effectively, after The Devil's Rejects Free Bird has never been the same to me.

Now here's something that has gotten me called crazy on this site before, I actually like Halloween II better. The punk rock, the psycho-billy party, the smoking hot chicks that work in the alternative record store and are demented as hell. The strange, surreal dream sequences. The gore and psychological insanity. That opening hospital homage to the original Halloween II. Spellbinding.

I love all of his films. House of a Thousand Corpses, The Devil's Rejects. Amazing films that relish the horror genre. Utterly unique. Campy, even silly, but at the same time powerful and shot with a master's touch.

Right now he is finishing a horror movie about clowns, also staring Malcolm McDowell, and he has started pre-production on a bio-flick about Groucho Marx. Not horror. Strange, right? We'll see how it goes. Then he says he is planning a sequel to The Lords of Salem.

Donald Pleasance is an amazing actor, but so is Malcolm McDowell. I'd have to say apples and oranges, they are both great.

Hilarious scene in Halloween II, when Weird Al Yankovik says, "Michael Myers, you mean that guy that made those Austin Powers movies?"