Accept no substitutes

I will not be seeing Rob Zombie’s remake of the 1970s horror classic Halloween this weekend. I’m really hating these “new takes” on great old films. In the past few years, the worst of the bunch, off the top of my head, were Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes, the Coen brothers’ dreadful spin on the fantastic 1955 British comedy The Ladykillers, Sean Penn’s butchering of All the King’s Men and, very worst of all, Gus Van Sant’s needless shot-by-shot color re-do of Hitchcock’s Psycho, starring the comedic Vince Vaughn as Norman. Ack!

But Zombie’s new movie does give me an excuse to break out the John Carpenter masterpiece again. And I’m reminded of my thirty-year infatuation with P.J. Soles, who played a short-lived, sex-kitten babysitter in the original film. Whew.