In the fifth installment of the SAW franchise, Hoffman is seemingly the last person alive to carry on the Jigsaw legacy.  But when his secret is threatened, Hoffman must go on the hunt to eliminate all loose ends.

SAW V is a Lionsgate Release. Twisted Pictures Presents a Burg/Koules/Hoffman Production.

While it seems to me that it’s a mistake to remake a legendary flick, that doesn’t mean filmmakers don’t occasionally give it a try. The horror genre appears most open to remakes of iconic efforts, and we can add 2007’s Halloween to the list. Rock star turned director Rob Zombie takes the reigns for this update of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic.

If you saw the original, you’ll know the plot of this one, though the 2007 version offers a new introduction. We go back to the mid-1970s to meet pre-teen Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch), a disturbed kid in a massively dysfunctional family. Michael constantly gets in trouble at school and he displays troubling behavior such as killing animals. Child psychologist Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) wants to assess Michael, but the boy takes a turn for the worse before this happens. Michael goes on a killing spree and undergoes psychiatric incarceration.

While in a sanitarium, Michael undergoes work with Loomis but the boy’s mental status degenerates. Eventually he kills again when he goes after a nurse, an action that pretty much ensures his permanent residency at the sanitarium.

With that, the flick leaps ahead 15 years to find a hulking Michael (Tyler Mane) still in the sanitarium. Silent for that entire time, Loomis still works with him, though obviously to no avail, so the doctor finally quits the case. When some drunken sanitarium guards taunt Michael one time too many, he kills them and escapes. This starts another killing spree, one that brings him home to Haddonfield Illinois in an attempt to find his sister (Scout Taylor-Compton). The flick follows Michael’s violent path and the attempts to stop him.

If some one can tell me why this remake of Halloween exists, I’d love to hear it. I’d guess that two factors came into operation. First, these remakes of older horror flicks are cheap and they do pretty well. No, Halloween’s gross of $58 million didn’t set any worlds on fire, but it’s perfectly fine for a film in this genre, especially given the movie’s modest $15 million budget.

I suspect the other reason for the movie’s existence stems from a misguided desire to “improve on” the original. Though the John Carpenter Halloween did a lot to launch the “slasher” genre, it offered exceedingly little actual violence. Most of the mayhem was implied, not seen, and the film worked more like a thriller than the bloodfests we’d get a few years later.

Given the “tame” nature of the Carpenter version’s violence, I suppose Zombie and others figured it’d be much more entertaining if it amped up the gore. And boy does Zombie achieve that goal! Actually, I don’t want to overstate the level of violence, as the 2007 Halloween isn’t absurdly bloody, but it definitely eliminates the subtlety found in the original. This one comes with a few fairly graphic scenes and plays more like a splatter flick.

So I expect those who dislike the tame qualities of the 1978 edition will like the bloodiness of the new one, and they get more explicit elements in other ways. The Zombie version is simply a lot nastier in many different ways. We get a ton more profanity, much of which seems gratuitous and unnecessary. We also find more nudity, which is fine with me; call that gratuitous as well – which it is – but I won’t complain.

The biggest changes come with the addition of Michael’s backstory. If you remake a film, you really need to do something different with your take, and I will give Zombie credit in that department. If nothing else, no one can claim that he simply rehashed the original – at least not for the flick’s first half. The sections that take place in Haddonfield after Michael’s escape tend to more closely resemble the scenes from the Carpenter version; Zombie doesn’t literally replicate them, as he makes some changes, but they’re often quite close.

So that leaves the parts with the young Michael to stand as the movie’s most original statement. The film’s extended introduction attempts to answer questions about Michael but it fails miserably. First of all, the flick revels in its unpleasantness, as it presents the crudest, nastiest family on record. Obviously Zombie intends to show us how this environment created Michael, but he fails. If the setting screwed him up so badly, why do the others not turn psycho as well? It’s a simple explanation of a complex problem.

And it also seems absurd, since it’s hard to imagine any clan being so insanely dysfunctional. Michael’s family makes the folks on Jerry Springer look like the Cleavers. The movie needs to leaven the material in some way but instead prefers to bask in the foul stench.

I might excuse the over the top look at the family if Zombie introduced any real psychological complexity. Zombie doesn’t really attempt to explain what happened to Michael. The film vaguely blames his messed up family but that only goes so far, and it doesn’t touch on the causes of Michael’s continued decline over the years. He goes badly downhill as the years pass but we learn no real reason for it. The result is completely devoid of psychological merit; Zombie puts on pretensions in that regard but creates more questions than answers.

The ridiculous lack of continuity or storytelling clarity doesn’t help. Frankly, the flick is a mess in most ways. It boasts no sense of pace and comes with lots of odd editing choices, such as the decision to linger on the bully forever as he leaves the school. That shot never ends but adds nothing, and it becomes perplexing.

We find an awful lot of confusing story issues, starting early in the film. What state puts 10-year-olds on trial for murder? I don’t think even Texas would do that. Why does Loomis go from working at the school to serving at the sanitarium? Why is his baby sister still an infant when he’s been away for years? Why does Loomis remain the only psychologist on the case for 15 years when Michael just gets worse and worse?

The answer to all these questions and many more? Plot contrivances and sloppy filmmaking. Look, I’m willing to suspend disbelief when I get into a movie. I’ll allow all sorts of iffy choices and goofy logic if I find myself involved in a story. Unfortunately, the 2007 version of Halloween doesn’t draw me into its world at all. A third of the flick provides a banal look at Michael Myers’ “origin story”, and the rest does little more than rehash the superior work from the original. There’s nothing worthwhile on display here.