At the Movies

I've recently caught 2 horror movies in theaters, one being Rob Zombie's interpretation of Halloween,the other being Hatchet. Halloween is pretty much showing everywhere, but Hatchet was only playing in 1 theater in the tr-state area.
While I'm not a fan of more recent horror movies, and even less a fan of remakes, I saw Halloween anyway. I had seen Devil's Rejects, and thought it was ok, so I figured Rob Zombie might do a decent job. The original Halloween movies were pretty awesome, but the last few were terrible. In this one, they try to go more in depth with the origin of Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis' relationship. In reality, they waste a good 45 minutes to establish that Michael just kills for no reason... As if I couldn't figure that out already. They show his affinity for masks, and how he obtains his trademark jumpsuit. There's plenty of blood and nudity, which all self respecting horror fans love. Zombie naturally cast his usual cast of characters to play cameos in this as well. The best casting decision was to cast Danielle Harris (Halloween 4/5) as one of Laurie's friends. The ending seemed so forced that by the end of the movie I really didn't care anymore. It seems like they added an extra half hour just for a chase scene through the house. Hopefully there won't be any sequels, which I don't think they planned since Michael and Loomis seem to be dead.
Hatchet is promoted as "old school american horror," which is basically referring to classic slasher gore. The movie follows a group of tourists who find themselves stranded in the woods of New Orleans when their boat tour crashes. The woods are inhabited by Victor Crowley, a deformed man who was thought to have died in a fire. Or maybe it's a ghost, either way the dude's huge and violent. The special effects are all makeup and no CGI (thank god), and the gore is top notch. The story kin dof falls apart, since you don't really see much of Victor aside from when he's mutilating people, and the tourists are all annoying and un-funny. This movie had a lot of potential, but could have been a lot better. If this had the support that Halloween did, maybe they would have put more development into it. Even though it was kind of disappointing, it was still way better than most recent horror movies by far.
I did see a really good horror movie recently, which was the straight to DVD movie, Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon. It started off as a sort of documentary of a reporter following a man in trainign to be a killer. In this reality Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers and Freddy Kreuger are all real people. They follow his training, finding his target and setting traps in a house. In the end, the reporter and camera crew find themselves in the main event. In a way it's similar to Scream how they talk about horror movies in a horror movie, but didn't completely suck like Scream did. This movies is a horror movie for horror fans. It's got loads of cameos, humor, gore, nudity and a damn good story. I highly recommend giving this one a spin, I found it on DVD real cheap on Amazon.