Babysitters beware: Nasty Halloween hacker Michael Myers is back.

You can exhale now, fan-boys.

Rob Zombie's remake -- or should we say, re-imagining -- of John Carpenter's seminal slasher flick Halloween doesn't suffer from the same tricked-out excess as the other high-gloss horror updates we've been subjected to in recent years.

Unlike the hacks behind the bastardizations of the Hills Have Eyes and Texas Chainsaw franchises, Zombie isn't just looking to modernize what's come before by tossing herky-jerky camera effects and ever-escalating amounts of gore into the mix.

His version of Halloween -- the trailblazing slice-'em-up about a masked psychopath who stalks babysitters -- is more of a Valentine to the original than a recycled cash-grab.

Carpenter's version -- for awhile the most lucrative indie film on the books -- had a simple, sparse elegance to it, thanks to the minimal amount of bloodshed, some carefully constructed set pieces and strong work by a then-unknown Jamie Lee Curtis in what Roger Ebert would come to call the Final Girl role.

And while Zombie is no mimic, he is a devout genre buff, as evidenced by his first two films (House of 1,000 Corpses and its sorta-sequel, The Devil's Rejects), whose campy humour and extreme gross-outs belied real skill behind the lens.

Here, he opts to delve deeper into the pyscho psyche of Michael Myers, mapping out a dysfunctional family life replete with stripper mom, abusive father figure and slutty older sister who won't take Mikey trick-or-treating.

The white-trash cliches are piled on kind of thick -- basically, if your kid's a bully magnet whose pet rats keep dying on him, it might be time to lock up the silverware -- but the extended intro is a neat way of arriving at the mini-killing spree that opened the original.

And even after Michael's homicidal tendencies are out in the open, Zombie doesn't just fast-forward to the events of the Carpenter flick, choosing to stick with Mikey in the looney-bin as he grows from a sullen kid with a penchant for masks into a 6-foot-8 giant who's spent the past decade living inside his head.

Is the extended backstory an attempt to create sympathy for a killer? Probably not, since it's still hard to side with someone whose concept of right and wrong is so skewed he dispatches kindly janitors with the same indifference as sleazy truck drivers and cell wardens.

Besides, the history lesson is only the first half of the movie. In no time, Michael's back on home turf in Haddonfield, where he's free to look up some old ghosts. We have to tread carefully where plot is concerned (anyone who has seen the second, seventh or eight instalments knows what we're talking about), but it spoils nothing to say that Myers -- played by former wrestler Tyler Mane -- quickly makes life hell for the trio of teen beauties which happens across his path.

Purists will be happy to see Zombie riffing on some the original's elements: The Blue Oyster Cult tune, the doomed boyfriend's dorky glasses and the bitchy cheerleader whose every second word is "totally" are all present.

So are the two-finger piano score, the shrieky synth cues, and the whiny little kids with the boogeyman fixation. Oh, and Zombie fans will have fun spotting faces from his first two flicks -- the entire Firefly family stops by for cameos, as do cult faves Clint Howard, Brad Dourif, Dee Wallace Stone and Malcolm McDowell, the latter taking over for Donald Pleasance as the psychologist who first diagnoses Michael's depravity.

In the Final Girl role, newcomer Scout Taylor-Compton barely registers, though that may have more to do with Zombie's one misstep: His decision to step up the body count results in a middle half that's just not that scary, since the killings come at such a rapid clip you barely have time to catch your breath.

But by staying true to the late-'70s spirit of the first flick, not to mention building on some of its smarter parts, he at least comes up with a remake that's more than just a pale shadow of its former self.
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