Dorkgasm Gonzo Is God

Rob Zombie is an artist first, and a filmmaker/musician second. Another view might hold that his films and music are part of his artistic body of work. In either case, he shows his ability to assemble seemingly unrelated pieces into a whole better than ever before on the new soundtrack to his remake of Halloween. This is the kind of album that rips your balls off and uses them as a makeshift hood ornament on a ’76 Dodge Charger.



Rob Zombie’s own music, as of late, has become a sort of blend between hillbilly rock and references to horror cinema obscura, but it is absent from this soundtrack. Instead, Zombie treats the music with the same respect we hope he has for the film itself. A selection of hard-rocking ’70s songs coupled with snippets of dialogue from the movie might normally be enough for me to assign credit for an album like this to Quentin Tarantino, but as I said before, Rob Zombie is an artist. While I cannot malign the eclectic versatility of soundtrack albums like Reservoir Dogs or Pulp Fiction, they are kindergarten finger-painting compared to Zombie’s Salvador Dali.



See, Zombie understands that the dialogue must act as a vessel to carry forth the emotional life’s-blood of the film. It should be more than snarky dialogue that vapid fan-boys quote with glee; it should punch you in the gut and make you want to rush into battle. This soundtrack embodies that ideal, and Zombie sends a chill down our collective spines right away with a monologue from Malcolm McDowell. He then follows it up like a one-two knife punch with Tyler Bates’ version of John Carpenter’s classic Halloween theme. The only way I can describe it is “dirty”. It’s like Bates took the almost perfect theme, let a rabid dog roll around with it in a pit filled with broken glass and festering viscera and then polished it up like shiny brass testicles. I won’t go as far as saying he improved the theme, but there is definitely something sinister lurking among Carpenter’s familiar synthesizer tones.



The next twenty-two tracks alternate between film dialogue that does more to sell the pending film than trailers, and tracks by Rush, Alice Cooper, Kiss, Blue Oyster Cult, and others that make up a virtual pantheon of Early Metal Bands. The only obvious exclusion here is AC/DC, who have been getting a lot of play at sports arenas lately anyway, kind of diminishing the power they once seemed to hold. Still, “Thunderstruck” would fit right in here with “Don’t Fear the Reaper” and “Tom Sawyer”. I can only hope that Zombie put the movie together as well as he has this soundtrack. Overall, this CD will make you want to grab a big knife, slip into some coveralls, and drive around in a Charger looking for new hood ornaments.