HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION (2002) What? Michael's still alive? That's amazing! I salute the iron constitution of anyone who is not driven to vomiting by this wretched mess. Not that it's particularly gory (though it is, by this series' standards), or that it has too many Michael Bay-style nausea-inducing quick-cuts. No, what makes this movie particularly sickening is the way it so gleefully jumps on every bandwagon in sight, latches on to every available trend so this franchise can extend its lifespan a little longer. This one doesn't just want to be Halloween, it wants to be The Blair Witch Project too, with thumbs dipped in the pies of rap fans, teen sex comedies, and people who snicker at jokes about the internet because of the word "Yahoo". The only reason anybody would be even slightly curious about this movie is that it has Rick "Halloween II" Rosenthal as the director. Halloween II worked because it was well-made enough that it was skilfully evocative of the original, despite the dumb story and script. That this movie would have a dumb story and script is probably something that could've been safely assumed long before the first minute of screen time has elapsed, but whatever magic Rosenthal was able to work in part II is not in evidence here. This one starts with Jamie Lee Curtis, now playing catatonic in a mental institution 'cuz the guy she decapitated at the end of the last movie wasn't really Michael. Anybody not see that coming? Hell, that's what everybody was saying back in 1998, though none of us thought it likely that Michael would don a paramedic's garb and walk around with his presumably burnt-all-to-shit face unnoticed by everyone around him. Soon Michael catches up to her and kills her, though not without an unlikely trap set by Curtis which is, nevertheless, effective up to a point. That point would be where she walks up to the supposedly helpless masked madman and attempts to remove his mask, y'know, just to be sure. Wouldn't the smart move have been to stand back and tell him that hey buddy, the only way I'm not going to kill you is if you take off your mask right now and prove you're not Michael? Goodbye, Jamie Lee. Then the Blair Witch shit comes into play. A bunch of students at Haddonfield University (Haddonfield has a University now) are selected to spend Halloween night at Michael's childhood home, which has conspicuously been left with a lot of stuff in it you'd think would have been snurched by 39 years of looters. Actually, this is a plot point which is addressed later on. In the meantime, the viewer is left merely to assume that the makers of this movie do indeed think we're that stupid. This operation is headed up by Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks, who have a huge rack of monitors displaying the feed from many cameras set up through the house, and the ones strapped to each of the students' heads. These two are always looking away when something nasty is happening on camera. Meanwhile, housands of people are watching on the internet, as we see through a bunch of teenagers watching at a Halloween party. I only recognized one of the students, which is a pretty low number for slasher movies these days. Otherwise, there's a handful of kids who all have exactly one aspect to define them (a lecher, a cook, a wannabe newscaster), though all I could do to tell them apart was that one looked a lot like Brittany Murphy, and another like a young Julianne Moore. The lead girl, Bianca Kajlich, has nothing to define her, really - for that matter, she more or less disappears from the movie for quite a while in the middle, only to return when the diminishing numbers of other students in the house require attention to be refocused upon her simply because there's barely anyone left to focus it on. Michael himself is the same ol' Michael, though dumber than usual, it seems. Early in the movie, he smashes head-first through a door to get at Jamie Lee - later on, trying to look outside the house, he smashes his head right through the window, instead of opening it. It's not like it was stuck. A possible "silver bullet" is introduced early on in the form of high-pitched noises which stop him dead in his tracks - despite the heroine of this movie being able to scream loud and shrill enough to shatter glass (no exaggeration, a point is made of showing the glass shattering), nothing comes of this. Probably for the best. Early in the movie he decapitates one man and takes the time to put his head in a dryer. You might ask, why? The victim's friend enters the room to investigate what's making that thumping noise, and apparently steps over the headless body on his way to the dryer but doesn't notice. The Myers house has a dungeon now, one wall away from a basement holding cell which, I think, was supposed to be fake. But the dungeon's real. Maybe this is where Michael's been hiding out for, uh, 25 years now? I guess so. Several deleted scenes and alternate endings on the DVD suggest substantial tinkering to make top-billed Busta Rhymes look "better" - by which I mean, he gets to go from villain to hero without explanation or apology, and gets one-liners like "Trick or treat, muthafucka!" Is this a sop to his ego, or his fans? It used to be a gimme in horror movies that the black guy was gonna die - it's still like that, but with an exception: the hit record exception. If the black guy has a hit record, he's as indestructible as Myers. Is this progress? This movie is shit, pandering shit. What little good can be said about it is, Carpenter's Halloween Theme is only flogged out once after the opening credits, and the cast is mildly likeable, or maybe just attractive. But then, they're always attractive these days. Rosenthal's direction is adequate, at least when he's not aping The Blair Witch Project, in which case it sucks. Worst Halloween sequel ever. BACK TO THE H's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE