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Reviews
Bits and Pieces (1985)
Good for what it is, limited by its own producers.
The director, Leland Thomas, taught film-making at the film school I went to for a few years, and the entire first quarter of school he teaches new students a basics of production class, and the entire time he tells all his students that at the end of the quarter he'll show everyone how not to make a movie, and eventually, sometimes grudgingly, shows Bits and Pieces. He even admits it's a grandly terrible film, but for his students and the people that know Lee, this movie is fantastic. Sure, it was made for the sole purposes of making money, and eventually cut down by the producers so the cut that is circulating (not sure where, he said it might get a DVD release someday soon) is devoid of pretty much all the gore they shot for the film. Not that gore would save this mess of a film, but if you know Lee and the type of heartfelt guy he is, you can't solely blame him for making this movie terribly. Still, when I finally saw it, it was a funny movie, and I enjoyed watching it, if only for the reasons stated above, and it's a lot better when you're told for 3 months how terrible it is going to be, and all the reasons why. Definitely a great learning experience I must say.
Halloween (2007)
What boring, cliché junk.
I, like many people before me, love Halloween, and even all of its sequels. This monstrosity, however, is a slap in the face to not only John Carpenter and his Halloween story, but to horror fans in general, telling us we're all the same dumb morons that want to watch the same dumb crap over and over. Honestly, this feels like an FBI profiler's docu-drama on the life of Michael Myers, not the movie that showed his prolific killing skills and explained the absence of humanity in his character. This is not much better than those Dahmer, Gacy, or Bundy movies that came Direct-To-Video. They aren't bad, but they're telling us a story we already know, but dumbed down and explained for those that are too stupid. The emptiness of the character that is Michael Myers, The Shape, is what made Halloween a classic fright film. This is an obvious Hollywood money-making scheme, and practice for Rob Zombie to see how many breasts and curse words he could fit into a movie, again. Still, it gets two points for the use of the music, and the sudden brutality of the Myers character. Otherwise, my advice for Rob Zombie is to make an original movie, this is essential his third remake/ripoff. His first was a rehashed, weirded-out Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the second film a Manson tribute, and this, the third, doesn't even deserve to share the title with it's predecessor.