Halloween (2007)

Parents need to know that director Rob Zombie's "re-imagined" slasher flick, Halloween (2007), leaves no blood, gore, or sex to viewers' imagination: It's all here in spades. Savage stabbings, slayings, and bashings are presented in ugly close-up. Most (though not all) of killer Michael Myers' victims seem to be sexually active teenagers, and viewers see female characters in various forms of undress, including nearly full nudity. In the unrated version, two sanitarium workers sneak into the sanitarium drunk and attempt to rape a female patient before Myers kills them. Characters -- including kids -- use profanity; with the exception of racist slurs, every curse word in the book is used, including "f--k" used several times, and a teen character spelling out "c--t." Unlike the original, where Myers is shown as a mostly unknown force of evil, this remake attempts to craft more of a backstory for Myers, painting the picture of a home life in which a drunk stepfather never works and makes lecherous comments about his stepdaughter, his teen sister would rather sneak off and have sex with her boyfriend rather than take Myers trick or treating, and a school life where Myers is the target of bullies who have discovered that Myers' mother works in a strip club. While these scenes momentarily suggest that Myers is an almost sympathetic character and a victim of circumstance, it doesn't take long to see that this backstory is really just a device to heighten that Myers was born the way he was and not a product of how he grew up. Families might use this opportunity to talk about how often crime, antisocial behavior, and evil acts are rooted in environment, how often it's a product of extreme mental illness, and to what extend "nature versus nurture" guides individual behavior.