As we head toward the end of the month and everyone gearing up for Halloween, things don’t look too good for a filmatic enjoyment of the holiday. Maybe it’s due to two lackluster horror films having already hit the theaters this month, Rob Zombie’s unnecessary sequel to his unnecessary remake of Halloween (2007), Halloween II (2009) and the Megan Fox vehicle Jennifer’s Body (2009), where a high school cheerleader gets transformed into a vampire/ ghoul hybrid who feeds on high school boys.
While the latter has an interesting sex reversal premise, the fact that she mostly targets the nerdy unpopular boys instead of the popular jocks, kills a lot of the vicarious thrill in the film. Instead of the guilty pleasure in seeing smug, macho and bullying jocks get taken out, it is the saddening sight of the already victimized members of the school who get consumed (and yes, obviously, I was one of those geeky nobodies back in high school).
Adding to the film’s problems is the same thing that has killed a lot of new horror films, most notably Wes Craven’s Cursed (2005), taking R rated material and toning it down to PG-13 to gurantee a wider audience. People that go to see a film like Jennifer’s Body are not the same audience you get for Twilight (2008), it’s premise appeals more to gorehounds who watch movies like Saw (2004) and Hostel (2005), and who probably all lined up to see Sorority Row (2009) instead. The only thing I can say about this one is that as remakes go it’s better than the original House on Sorority Row (1983), which isn’t hard to do considering how awful the original was. That being said, it is still sad to see Carrie Fisher appearing in the new one as the house mother (I guess script doctoring jobs are getting scarce these days).
Looks like this Halloween I’m going to be breaking out the old Universal classics again and staying home.
