michael myers Tagged Articles at Cinematical

With Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of Halloween, we found out that Michael Myers was not so much evil incarnate as he was an ill-tempered white-trash nut-job (yes, there is a difference). So, with tomorrow's release of his sequel to the remake -- Halloween II, not to be confused with Halloween II -- we take a stab (har) at predicting what little-known characteristics about the boogeyman will be revealed this time around.

1. He also has a brother -- In one of those convenient we-forgot-to-tell-anyone-before tangents, someone breathlessly reveals that Laurie Strode was actually a Siamese twin, and that her brother was separated and sent elsewhere. Laurie finds out when he friends her on Facebook, and their tearful reunion is marred only by the fact that their big brother shows up and proceeds to skewer poor Maury Strode on a nearby curtain rod.

2. He has serious allergies -- We see Michael trying to sneak up on Laurie the following Easter, only to repeatedly give himself away with a series of sneezes or trail of tissues. It's this dilemma that keeps him to his autumnal killing spree, not the eponymous holiday itself.

The first "official" photos from Sly Stallone's action-packed The Expendables has arrived online (courtesy of AICN), and one features Eric Roberts and Stone Cold Steve Austin flying through the air following an explosion of some sorts. If the words 'Eric Roberts', 'Stone Cold Steve Austin' and 'explosion' don't immediately force you to write the word 'AWESOME' in ALL CAPS (before yelling it out your apartment window for the whole world to hear), then I'm sorry, but there's really no hope for you. Check out all three images in the gallery below, and read one of these posts for more info on the film, which hits theaters on April 23, 2010.



Director Rob Zombie has already wrapped production on Halloween 2 (or H2), even though it feels as if only two weeks have passed since his return to the franchise was announced. Zombie celebrated by releasing an image of the new Michael Myers, stressing that this will be one of many faces Myers shows off in the new film. This comes after word spread that Myers will remain mask-less for 70% of the movie (see set photo evidence below), which would certainly be a huge departure from the original horror franchise. I dunno, I kinda like my slashers in a mask. Remove the mask and, well, they're just another random weirdo ... and I work with enough of those here at Cinematical. What do you think: With the mask or without it? (Click images below to view the new Myers)



More after the jump ...

As we approach Halloween, we're not the only ones shelling out all types of scary movie-related content. Which reminds me, have you checked out the 25 days worth of Halloween madness we've already written? It's good stuff. Read up, get scared. Boo. Anyway, those freaky folks from Cracked have put together a list of the top seven most easily escapable movie monsters. For example, both Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees aren't very fast when it comes to following their intended victims. In order to avoid being killed by one of them, all you really need to do is find an open field and run ... fast. Of course, according to our Friday the 13th death count, this didn't work out so well for 153 people.

Among the different movie monsters on their list are Samara Morgan from The Ring. In that film, there's a tape, there's a time of death and she crawls out of the television. Easily avoidable, says Cracked: "One would think the obvious thing to do would be to step outside and leave the TV behind. Co camping maybe." Or how about The Blair Witch, who apparently likes to stick people in the corner as push them over. Here's what Cracked suggests: "The Blair Witch is, however, old, dead and picks on children. If you are reading this distinctly adult-oriented site, you should be old enough to just punch her in the face and stroll away, possibly walking on her lawn in the process." I've always thought Chuckie would be pretty easy to get away from -- after all, he's a friggin' doll. How hard could it be to escape from a doll? Or what about zombies? I always loved that scene in Shaun of the Dead where they just pretend to be fellow zombies and cruise through the crowd. That's not too hard, just go a day without caffeine and most of us automatically turn into zombies. In your opinion, which movie monsters do you think are the most easily escapable?

If you have a teenager in your house, you already know they think everything their parents suggest is lame. Pop one of these flicks in the DVD player on family movie night, though, and you just might up your cool quotient a notch or two. Your teen is probably familiar with the more recent horror flicks that have come down the pike, but a marathon night of some of these films will show him that mom and dad know horror, too. Besides, every horror fan should have a basic knowledge of some of the old-school stuff. (And yeah, I know there are a lot of films I left off this list, but I could only pick seven, and these are my personal faves ... what are yours?)

Scream -- I can't say I'm a real horror girl, but if Scream had come out when I was a teenager, my friends and I would have watched it over and over again. It's fun, it's creative, it has (like so many great horror flicks) a scary killer in a mask. Who could the killer be? Half the fun of Scream is that the killer could be anyone -- after watching this film, your teen might just re-evaluate her own friends. Which of them might have the potential to be a psycho killer? You just never know.

Following the Labor Day success of Rob Zombie's re-invented Halloween, we knew it wouldn't be long before our old pal Jason Voorhees popped back up on the big screen. Like folks are just going to sit around and let Michael Myers soak up that box office cha-ching all by himself. No. Not a chance. There have been rumors circling around a new Friday the 13th flick for awhile now, with some saying they'd do a franchise re-boot (a la Halloween), though I have a feeling the peeps over at Platinum Dunes were waiting to see how well Myers was received in his return. And now that they've seen him rake in the dollars, they've apparently decided to fast-track the flick and place it on their pre-strike roster, replacing Roger Clemens: Will The Man Ever Retire???? (Not a real title, but a film someone should probably make -- after all, the dude seems to have more lives than Freddy, Jason and Myers)

According to ShockTillYouDrop, who've heard from a source that is "100%, solid gold, baby," Dunes has just brought writers Damian Shannon and Mark Swift on to pen a draft of the new Friday the 13th. For those that don't remember, Shannon and Swift were also the guys who brought us Freddy vs. Jason -- a film I still have not seen in its entirety, though I've heard fans enjoyed it. Shock also gives us a little backstory on the current film, recalling how early drafts from Mark Wheaton (The Messengers) were shelved, and that Jonathan Liebesman was attached as director. There's currently no word on whether Liebesman is still onboard, or what direction they'll be taking the franchise, but there's now a pretty good chance we'll see that freaky hockey mask guy wreak havoc at some point within the next year.

This week, slasher legend Michael Myers will be resurrected once again, this time in a total page one remake of John Carpenter's 1978 classic. It's been a long, strange road for Myers -- at one point, I think his mind was being controlled by Druids? -- but Rob Zombie's remake attempts to go somewhere new with the character by focusing almost the entire first hour on Myers' messed-up childhood -- Carpenter devoted comparatively little time to the origin story -- showing us his torment at the hands of school bullies, his disgust at his slovenly couch potato step-father and promiscuous sister, and tracking his slow degradation into a mute nutjob. This first section of Halloween, which strongly echoes the grotesque, white-trash circus atmosphere that surrounds Zombie's first two films, House of 1000 Corpses and its sequel, The Devil's Rejects, is where you'll most easily see the director's fingerprints. A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from Rob to talk about the film, what he wanted to accomplish with it, and what other irons he's got in the fire.

RS: So have you seen the film with an audience yet?

RZ: I've seen the film twice, two different versions with an audience, but I have not seen the final, finished version yet.

RS: How was the reaction in those early screenings?

RZ: The reaction was awesome -- it was one of those test screenings. You actually get more information than you'd normally get. It's actually hard to judge, when you're sitting in the crowd, what people are thinking. When I watch a movie, I don't make a sound or move. The more I'm into the movie, the more bored I look. So you're sitting there, kind of panicking, like 'I can't tell if people like it!' Then afterwards, when people started talking, everyone loved it. If someone jumps or something, you can tell they react, but most of the time when they're paying close attention, there's no reaction at all.

RS: Why was it important for you to cast a big, tall guy like Tyler Mane as the adult Michael? The scary thing about Michael is that he's crazy and you have no idea what he's thinking, right?

RZ: Well, the fact that he's tall doesn't take away the part that he's crazy or any of that. None of that is lessened. Two reasons -- one is that I didn't want to make him supernatural, you know, which he had sort of been. In order for a guy, in the other films, of his size to do the things he was doing, he'd have to be supernatural and have superhuman strength. I didn't want to do that, because I thought that had been done and I wanted to take a different approach. The only way to get somebody who could physically do the things I have him do in this movie would be someone of that size. And I just thought, frankly, he's much more frightening. When he comes crashing through ... You know, people always say that to me -- 'don't you think a normal-sized guy is more frightening? And I go 'F*ck no.' If a normal-sized guy comes at me, I'm not worried. If a guy like Tyler comes at me, I'm f*ckin' worried. I wanted him to be like Frankenstein -- a total monster. And he is. Tyler's great, because he's not ... he used to be a lot bigger. He lost 100 pounds, so he's not really bulky. He's actually pretty slim, but he's just so big. I wanted him to have a physical presence that was different than, you know, the average people in the movie, and he totally does.

A brand new trailer for Rob Zombie's re-imagined Halloween has just arrived online, and I have to say it looks pretty good. Of course, since the trailer is quite obviously cut together so that it doesn't offend anyone, we can't truly see how bloody and gory Zombie's taken our old friend Michael Myers. What we need is a sweet red band trailer for this bad boy; I want to see Myers tearing someone's head off. The violence we do see, however, looks a bit more hand-to-hand and realistic than other Halloween sequels. I dig that. I often tire of watching someone like Myers (or Jason) rip a flagpole out of the ground and stick it through some poor, unsuspecting teenager having sex. I want to see fights. I want to see people scratching and clawing for their lives. I want to see Zombie bring Myers down to a level where we can almost imagine something like this happening somewhere in the real world.

And that's what Zombie is doing with this updated version; at least it appears that way. Right off the bat, we hear a news story that compares the Myers killings (when the young Myers hacks his family) to the Manson murders. By grounding this film in reality, I feel it will be a lot more successful. I already love the stuff with Myers in the mental hospital -- this was an aspect of the Halloween story that I always wanted to see more of. Just the fact that Zombie will dedicate a good amount of the film to this time in Myers' life is definitely something that intrigues me. Will we see Myers up to his old tricks? Hell yes. There will be plenty of him returning to Haddonfield, slicing his way through neighbor after neighbor, until he finally ends up face-to-face with the sister he came searching for. I would've liked to see some more of Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) in the trailer, but part of me almost likes the fact that Zombie is keeping him in the background until it's time to see the film. Check out the new trailer, and let us know what you think. Halloween arrives in theaters on August 31.

With a little over a month to go before the release of Rob Zombie's Halloween, the director has released a whole slew of character posters on his MySpace page. They're not nearly as high-quality as the Golden Compass character sheets we brought you recently -- they all have the same background, so its mostly a cut and paste type of job, but they're not bad. There are posters for pretty much every major character here, from Scout-Taylor Compton as (a presumably smaller-chested) Laurie Strode to Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Loomis. There are two for Michael Myers, one of Tyler Mane as the adult, masked Michael and one of Daeg Faerch as the young Myers, with some kind of party hat pushed up onto his head and a creepy look on his face. There are even some posters for Danny Trejo, William Forsythe and Udo Kier -- I didn't even know the first two were in the movie until seeing these posters.

Also in his MySpace update, Zombie lets fans know that the official website for the film has been updated, with some new images in the cast bio sections. I took a look, and they do look like pics I haven't seen floating around yet, so hop on over if you're a Zombie-head. As of now, Halloween has its ticket punched for August 31, when the competition will be Balls of Fury, the Jennifer Lopez festival film Bordertown and Kevin Bacon's Death Sentence, which is being directed by another horror mainstay, James Wan. Looks like Wan isn't afraid to go head-to-head on this one -- we'll see who wins.

Oftentimes Hollywood's lack of originality leads to overexposed trends. Remember when every action movie seemed to be easily defined as 'Die Hard on a ...'? Remember when disaster movies were all the rage? And then twenty years later when they were all the rage again? Remember when there were like a hundred body-swapping comedies? Well, there appear to be fewer trends these days, or maybe it's just that Hollywood turns trends into full-blown practices, as in the case of sequels, comic book movies and fantasy films based on literary franchises. Nowadays even a promised trend, like the one involving religious Passion of the Christ copycats, isn't necessarily going to happen. But despite there being so few here-today-gone-tomorrow film fads, there's at least seven bad ideas currently in vogue in Tinsel Town, and all of them need to disappear soon, lest they too become permanent.

1. Torture Porn

I'm going to start with an easy, surely obvious one. Torture porn is the latest trend in horror, a genre that changes its predominant style every few years, and it may be the most despised -- at least by us non-horror junkies. I miss the days when a friend, an actual junkie, could drag me to a harmless scary movie that provided a few screams, a few laughs and afterward, at the most, a few silly nightmares. Now, with each new horror movie there's promise of a seriously depressing experience. After watching The Hills Have Eyes, I realized I hadn't been frightened at all. Instead I wanted to cry my heart out. I haven't been to a horror flick since, and my friend is going solo. Sure, I hear that Eli Roth's movies are a lot more enjoyable than watching a young woman raped while watching her father burned alive and her mother raped and then shot in the head, but I just haven't been in the mood to find out.

Apparently the torture porn trend is already on its way out. Hostel II performed poorly at the box office and Captivity may have peaked too soon, reaching maximum tastelessness before even opening in theaters. So what will be next? I'm rather looking forward to when slasher movies are in fashion again, when I can delight in seeing sinful human beings killed off quickly and deservedly by an implausible maniac. Which brings me to the next trend ...