Inglorious Basterds and Halloween II

Daddy got a day off on Friday so I caught a couple of movies.

Inglorious Basterds is probably Quentin Tarantino's best work since Pulp Fiction. It still doesn't stand up to that magnum opus but it has beat everything he's done since. Jackie Brown? Dull. Kill Bill 1 and 2? Two promising, yet overlong movies with lousy payoffs and bad writing. Death Proof? Thank God for the car chase at the end and for Kurt Russell's not-so-tough guy. With Basterds, he does something a little different: Turns a period piece into a Grindhouse revenge flick and I think it worked. The story involves a special ops team of Jewish American soldiers headed by Brad Pitt, a refugee Parisian Jew movie theater owner, and a turncoat German actress in cahoots with the English Army, all of whom want to end the Third Reich. Their goal is set before them when the theater owner, played by Diane Kruger, manages to host a Nazi-made docudrama premiere showcasing the heroics of a Nazi sharpshooter who killed 300 opposition soldiers from a belltower. When word that Hitler is considering attending the premeire, well, shit gets crazy. My only complaint about the film is that some scenes tend to drag due to Tarantino's penchant for long monologues. However, each chapter of the film has satisfying payoffs and the finale of the movie is one I won't forget for a while. I also won't forget the performance of Christophe Waltz as the "Jew Hunter", a Nazi investigator who's way too good at his job. He teems with intensity and makes you fidgit in your seat as he interrogates his subjects. In a just world, he would win an Oscar.

Halloween II, on the other hand, was a big disappointment. I'm a huge fan of Rob Zombie's work, especially The Devil's Rejects, my favorite horror film of all time. I enjoyed his remake of John Carpenter's Halloween quite a bit, appreciating it more with additional viewings. Following his MySpace blog for months, seeing pics of the production on-line and reading all the cool rumors about the movie had my interest piqued. Then I saw the movie. While the violence and gore don't disappoint at all (one of the goriest movies in recent memory), the writing and story were pretty lazy. Zombie admitted on Howard Stern that the movie studio wanted to do a sequel, but Zombie declined. The groundwork on the sequel with a different director began and then it was decided that the sequel would be a straight-to-DVD affair. Zombie felt like it would ruin what he created with the first film and he decided to take a stab at it again, so to speak. Ultimately, H2 comes off like a control freak who wanted to do a sequel his way even if it was half-assed. Instead of the terrifying crazy-from-the-womb Michael Myers who just killed, this time Michael is controlled by the ghost of his dead mother and his inner child. His sister has also gone nuts since Mike tried to kill her in the first film and she's seeing things too. So now we have a supernatural bent that's completely unnecessary. Instead of going this direction, I wish Laurie Strode had unloaded the Sheriff's gun in Michael's face to end the first movie instead of stabbing him and bringing on this lousy sequel. As we all know, stabbing a psycho rarely ever works. If you are going to go, go for the gore. Just prepare to be let down by the overall film.