Rob Zombie butchers ‘Halloween’ remake

In theaters

HALLOWEEN, directed by Rob Zombie, written by Zombie from the original screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill, 110 minutes, rated R.

Remaking a horror classic doesn’t have to be a horror show. All one has to do is look to Zack Snyder’s “Dawn of the Dead,” John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” Werner Herzog’s “Nosferatu” and Philip Kaufman’s “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” to see that it can be pulled off with panache.

Too bad the same isn’t true for Rob Zombie’s “Halloween,” which takes Carpenter’s 1978 film of the same name and runs a knife through its gut.

The film is a misreading of everything that made Carpenter’s low-budget classic work – attention to its two main characters, which was key, and especially attention to designing a landscape that allowed suspense to roam and mount.

Unlike Zombie, who numbs with his overbearing use of gore, Carpenter didn’t rely on excessive violence to build momentum. Instead, he leaned on the energy generated by his spellbinding score and the idea that in the heartland, a bogeyman with a thing for butcher knives and Halloween masks could wreak such havoc.

This new “Halloween” is mostly about backstory.

Unlike its inspiration, which didn’t tell us much of anything about the serial killer Michael Myers, here we get a movie that pummels us with all the reasons 10-year-old Michael (Daeg Faerch) went on his killing spree.

Naturally, his family is the problem – and what a family Michael has. Every one of them is white-trash poison. His mother (Zombie’s real-life wife, Sheri Moon Zombie) is a pole stripper, his stepfather (William Forsythe) is an abusive alcoholic, and his sister is the typical self-involved teen who would rather have sex with her sketchy boyfriend than be nice to her brother. Their command of the English language is reduced to a run of expletives, which join the over-the-top gore in that they lose their impact simply because they’re employed so freely.

To keep his mind off his family, Michael, who favors a clown mask to hide his cherubic face, takes to torturing animals, which Zombie shows in detail (nothing is sacred here – it’s all for the screen, not for the imagination). Then, when things really get out of hand at home, he lets his family have it with the sort of brutality that makes you question the film’s R rating.

Flash-forward 17 years and Michael (now played by Tyler Mane) has escaped from a mental institution. His aim is to reconnect with his long-lost sister, Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) – who has none of the sweet awkwardness Jamie Lee Curtis possessed in the original – and to kill her friends along the way. Trying to stop him is his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell, awful), but will Loomis get to Michael before Michael gets to Laurie?

Since it’s at this point that “Halloween” becomes a near play-by-play of the original, albeit with much less finesse, tension and subtlety, it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.

Grade: D

On Blu-ray disc

SLEEPY HOLLOW, directed by Tim Burton, written by Andrew Kevin Walker, 110 minutes, rated R.

Tim Burton’s 1999 film “Sleepy Hollow,” now available on Blu-ray disc, plucks what it wants from Washington Irving’s “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” severs what it doesn’t, and rewrites a story that needed no changes at all.

For fans of the classic, it’s disconcerting to sit through Burton’s version, especially since Ichabod Crane (Johnny Depp) is now a New York police constable and not a schoolteacher. More curious is the diminished role of Brom Van Brunt (Casper Van Dien), whose presence is never given the importance Irving gave it in the original.

But then, “Sleepy Hollow” has its own ideas about what it should be and works on two different planes – the visual and the narrative – with neither forming a cohesive whole.

Burton and his cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki have cranked up the fog machines and dimmed the moon to create a somber, richly atmospheric film that is beautiful to look at in high definition, but the film’s characters struggle to connect with any of it. They’re too bridled with camp, too emotionally removed, too oddly inhuman. Some might argue that’s Burton’s style, but in “Beetlejuice,” “Edward Scissorhands” and the first two Batman films, which preceded “Hollow,” he nevertheless was able to use his unusual characters to form an emotional bond with his audience, something he doesn’t do here.

Since Depp and Christina Ricci are at the heart of this film, much of its success rests on them. Ricci doesn’t come through. As Katrina Van Tassel, she is flat, never once convincing us that she’s this character, which undermines whatever chemistry she could have had with Depp, whose mannered performance is sweetly naive and one of the film’s strongest selling points.

If “Sleepy Hollow” fails with Ricci, it more than compensates with Miranda Richardson’s mincing performance as Lady Van Tassel and with the spectacular vision of the Headless Horseman himself. Here, Burton triumphs. With expertly choreographed scenes of action, this Horseman rides, spectacularly swinging his blade as he literally severs dozens of heads.

If that’s your thing, this film won’t disappoint. But if you were hoping for more from Burton, a director whose work has the distinction of being instantly recognizable, “Sleepy Hollow” is so hollow, it echoes.

Grade: B-

Visit www.weekinrewind.com, the archive of Bangor Daily News film critic Christopher Smith’s reviews, which appear Mondays, Fridays and weekends in Lifestyle, as well as on bangordailynews.com. He may be reached at Christopher@weekinrewind.com.