[movie - review] Halloween - The Beginning (2007)

Finally i got to see this Rob Zombie movie.
You know, I'm not so keen on remakes (okay, i hate them!) and this matter even regarding an artist i really like, both for his music and cinematographic production (House of 1000 corpses and The devil's rejects are two hell of movies!) and there are so many bodies in the sea of horror that i have always found a good excuses to avoid it.... but than it happened.
Truth to say, Rob didn't just made a rip-off of one of the most important and iconic movie of the last 40 years but he tried to expand the story going somewhat deeper into Myers' childhood to open a window for us to see how and, maybe, why everything's started.
The first part is all about little Michael's troubles within the family, at school and with other kids but also shows an already kinda of rotten soul who enjoy killing little animals. Was Michael a mind-weak victim, a mere product of what he had to suffer? Or it was a ticking bomb who was just about to explode, no matter what? Hard to say (not only for a work of imagination but it would have been also in reality) what's matter is that now we know something more about a legend as MM really is.
Honestly I didn't found that part that interesting or like something I needed to know... Michael Myers has been (and still is) an incarnation of pure evil, a charismatic presence, a towering concetrate of destruction... This is what our minds, hearts and guts needs to know about him!!
Usually I really love to learn something about the past of the villains that populates our microcosm, I'm eager to see from which pit of hell he/she came out, watching how things decay but Myers ...He is a presence that need no presentation, it's like the boogeyman that lives in your closet : you don't need to know why or what it is to be scared as shit. Michael Myers IS.
Apart from that the movie is enjoyable, with the classic old-style photography and direction that is Zombie's trademark but is clearly way below the grandeur of the original Carpenter flick (maybe this was useless to say).
The cast isn't bad and there are more than one known face, many of them from the previous works of  Rob (Sheri Moon Zombie, Bill Moseley, Sid Haig, William Forsythe, Ken Foree, Leslie Easterbrook, Lew Temple, Danny Trejo) plus other big names like Malcolm McDowell, Brad Dourif, William Forsythe and Udo Kier.
Probably the biggest "defeat" is for McDowell, that even with a more complex and deeper character lose his comparison with the original Dr. Loomis portraied by the great Donald Pleasence while the new Myers (Tyler Mane, Troy and X-men) is kinda of anonymous.

[movie - review] Antiviral (2012)

Some little spoilers are present

Is it the single sick mind that rot society from the inside?
Or is society itself that is sick, and infects every single one of us on different levels, as a virus can infect someone while being inactive on some others?

While society is driven by few people (the Powerful) it's sure as hell that all of us are conditioned by it and many also crave to be as the people who society put on covers, on the big screens.

So there are people that dress exactly like their idols, who change the colour of their hair, start drinking something because the star advertises it on tv. There are people who undergoes surgery to become like the star who they're worshipping.
Obviously over the entire history of cinema many directors filmed their personal manifest of complaint and Brandon Cronenberg did the same with this one.

In the movie society has reach a sick level of mass-media mania : people goes to clinic to have injected the same illness their favourite stars have... Even worst, they want to eat meat grown up from celebrities cells!

Within this sick sad world a young seller, working for one of the biggest company in the business, fell finally into it's own mania, driving the whole society to the ultimate madness...

Brandon Cronenberg, obviously son of David, filmed a slow movie (it reminded me the rhythm of his dad's Spider) but not boring, far from that. The aseptic look of some scene well contrasts the dirty things people are doing it it.

Fantastic performances by the main actor Caleb Landry Jones (X-Men : First Class, The Last Exorcism) and a short part also for the great Malcom McDowell (I really need to state some of his works?!)