@”But saying it and to a lesser extent House are not original movies is to say that Tarontino has yet to make one. An homage is ok if its your own in content.”

Very well, I can agree with both. However, paying homage to a type of movie is more tolerable to me than outright stealing from or ripping off an entire film. Also, good writing counts for a lot, which could be argued that Tarantino is very good at. Maybe if Rob Zombie was a much better writer with more diverse, interesting characters, I’d be more forgiving.

If you haven’t seen it already, but enjoy psychotic, relentless, human killers, you should look at John Carpenter’s Assault On Precinct 13, before he made Halloween. It’s his modern, urban version of Rio Bravo. Very cool. If you have a Netflix account, you can watch it for free through streaming video on Instant Watching.

Check out “Shuttle”. It’s rough but ultimately rewarding. It’s a suspensful, minimalist mean little flick in the 70’s exploitation tradition.

There’s no jump scares.

I have not seen a ’scary’ original American horror movie in at least a decade. While I have no interest in such garbage as Hostel I found that Halloween’s violence pushed my buttons in a way that American Horror has not been doing in any way. To me the only thing modern American films have been doing is using hard cuts from quiet to loud scenes or prolonged scenes of quiet with a predictable jump out at you with a loud noise moment to induce a scare that are to blatant and predictable to be scary. I don’t consider trying to make people jump worthy of being called scary. personally I find that he understands what gets an emotional reaction more than most people making horror in the US today. There are good scary movies just not in a North American accent.

I should say that The devils Rejects is nothing like Henry. It’s more of an homage to 70’s chainsaw type of horror crossed with a southern action/road movie with cheesy dialogue but a good soundtrack. But saying it and to a lesser extent House are not original movies is to say that Tarontino has yet to make one. An homage is ok if its your own in content.

He has yet to do an original piece. Remake or not, his films are all strongly derivative. House of 1000 Corpses is just Texas Chainsaw Massacre, while The Devil’s Rejects looks very much like Henry, Portrait Of A Serial Killer (haven’t seen that one so I’m not certain). His “version” of Halloween took out all the suspense of the source material and turned Myers into a generic, traditional mental case. Plus, Loomis is portrayed here as a terrible child psychologist. You’re just going to let him wear masks all day long like there’s nothing wrong with it? I liked the scene in the empty swimming pool, as it was a new setting and very effective, but aside from the acting (like you said, very credible), I cannot abide the movie.

I’ll just leave with this. Over at slashfilm.com it was announced that Rob Zombie is remaking the original, 1950s’ film, The Blob. Initially, I’d be fine with this, as I thought the 1988 version by Frank Darabont and Chuck Russell was very fun and occasionally intense, and I feel that a modern update could also be interesting in that same way. However, given his track record, I feel Zombie is going to mess this up royally, and a commenter from the slashfilm article summed up exactly how I feel about the man and his work:

“This is particularly amusing since before Halloween, he proudly proclaimed his contempt for remakes. I guess paychecks make a big difference in principles.

The problem with Zombie’s work is that while he’s technically competent, he’s a tragically awful storyteller in every respect — with words, pacing and tone. And though he obviously loves horror and exploitation, he doesn’t seem to really understand why — or at least is unable to properly articulate it, so he just emulates the style on a superficial level.

I also don’t think he comprehends what is scary — making audiences uncomfortable is not the same thing as scaring them.”