Halloween: Ressurreição

I want to start by saying Halloween H20 is my favorite movie in the franchise... That being said, it is only NATURAL for me to not like this one. It retcons the ending and all the characters are bland. If you are thinking "How bad can it be?", my answer is "I'd rather have Myers stab me than watch this movie again".

Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is catatonic locked in an asylum after the last encounter with Michael Myers. She is faking it and he is still after her. He stabs her in the back and sends her off the roof. Sara Moyer (Bianca Kajlich), Rudy Grimes (Sean Patrick Thomas) and Jen Danzig (Katee Sackhoff) are friends studying in Haddonfield University. Jen signs them up for a reality show at the Myers house. They are joined by Bill Woodlake (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Donna Chang, and Jim Morgan in the show run by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston (Tyra Banks). Myles Barton is in a chatroom relationship with Sara. Unknown to them, the six reality TV guests are locked in the house with Michael Myers.

Despite any possible retcon, the first fifteen minutes are still the best part of this movie. Jamie Lee Curtis is Halloween every bit as much as Michael Myers. The rest is something else. Whatever it is, it's not Halloween. The reality TV idea is annoying and it gets worst with the intermittent reality TV camera work. I like a few of the actors, but Tyra Banks and Busta Rhymes really lower the likability factor. It's so bad that I am more interested in everybody getting killed. I don't care if any of them survive.

Nothing about this movie made any sense, from the lame attempt to connect to the series in the beginning, to the mock Blair witch shaky cam horror show, with people watching at texting?! The dialogue and storyline were poorly written, the acting was terrible, and the leading lady totally useless.

What can I say? If I've seen a film worse than this, it certainly doesn't spring to mind right now. I managed to get to the first screening in the local area and, even though the audience was fairly small, I still counted eleven people who walked out at various points in the movie and never came back. Now either Michael Myers slashed them up on their way to the lavatories or, like me, they were bored stiff by this absolute CLUNKER of a flick.

The plot, or what little semblance there is of one, is simple yet completely ludicrous. An organisation called Dangertainment, headed by the entrepreneurial Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes), gets together a group of six students (!) to spend the night in serial killer Michael Myers' childhood home, in the hope that they will "find clues" as to what drove Myers to kill and kill again. Quite why, 25 years on from the murders, they think they will achieve anything by sending a group of teenagers into a house that, in the real world, would probably have long been demolished, is beyond me. Surely it is the job of police psychologists to dissect the minds of serial killers anyway? The film conveniently forgets the previous five sequels (with the exception of "H20"; this gets an irrelevant reference in the gratuitous opening scenes which serve merely as an excuse to waste Jamie Lee Curtis' talents in some customary 'running around' antics) and throws us almost immediately into the environment of the house, where each of the six kids are given a little handy-cam to strap to their heads and told to go searching for clues... You with me so far? Well, that's pretty much all there is to it. Needless to say, Myers himself shows up at the house about 10 minutes into the movie (how? why?) and decides he wants to kill everybody one by one, in the style we've now become accustomed to.

This paper-thin tale is told so badly, it's almost hard to believe what you're seeing on screen and that anyone was dumb enough to spend time and money filming it. I suppose you could almost see it like a series of noisy soundbites strung together randomly. It keeps things simplistic to the point of being nonsensical, presumably to avoid confusing its target audience of dribbling inbreds. I think I could've written a better, more entertaining and reasonable script myself on the back of a beermat. Nothing is ever explained or justified, no matter how implausible and ridiculous things get, and yet, bogglingly, the film still seems to take itself fairly seriously. It tries desperately to shock with a series of boring but bloody knife murders (nothing we haven't seen ad nauseam in any of the previous films) and innumerable 'false' scares with flashlights and toys falling out of cupboards. It's all so by-the-books and done-to-death that you'd have to have never seen a single horror film in your life to find it even remotely tense or scary.

I think what bugs me the most about the film is just how terribly made it is. Even forgetting the GAPING plot holes, there are loads of obvious continuity errors and a sad, desperate style of direction that seems to drag every scene to the point of agony in a desperate attempt to pad out the already-short running time of the film. The cast do nothing to help things - all the characters are cardboard stereotypes and the ugly, plastic teens seem to be having a battle to see who can be the most skin-crawlingly irritating. I think it ends up as a tie between Katee Sachoff's hyperactive, squeaky airhead and Bianca Kajlich's jitterbug 'heroine', who spends the entire movie simpering and screaming loudly every time someone drops a pin. Oh, for the record, Busta Rhymes is absolutely ATROCIOUS in this. His entire purpose in this movie seems to be to deliver the worst examples of wisecrack-by-numbers dialogue I've ever heard (ie: "Trick or treat, motherf**ker?") and he plays his role as a cross between Eddie Murphy and Vin Diesel, but without the charm or charisma of either.

I'd like to say John Carpenter would be ASHAMED to see such a horrible mess made out of his characters, but when you consider the maestro himself is making films almost as bad as this these days, he probably couldn't give a toss so long as the money keeps rolling in. I think this fact in itself proves just how much horror movies have changed since the first "Halloween" was made and, to its credit, "Halloween Resurrection" would be a perfect example of an "of its time" product you could stick in an 'early 21st century' time capsule for future generations to balk at. It is every bit as throwaway and pointless as the culture that spawned it. It is loud, crass and in-your-face constantly, despite having absolutely nothing to say when it gets there - it's like the movie equivalent of an annoying little brat screaming at you, desperate for attention. "Look at me! Look at me! I'm being noisy and irritating!"... I would highly advise, for your sanity's sake, that you don't look since, like that annoying child, you'll only encourage it and I, for one, don't think I could cope with another sequel this bad... This film is utter garbage and I fail to think of a single way in which they could've made it any worse. A resounding 0 out of 10.

Halloween: Resurrection starts off on the wrong foot and it's all downhill from there. Sure they found a clever way to undo the closure of Halloween H2O and make it possible to bring Mike up to his old shenanigans, unfortunately that whole segment is hasty and the rest of the movie's garbage. The "what really happened" explanation is just a loophole for making a movie that's neither necessary nor any good, and so I present to you Halloween: Resurrection.

I'm not going to write any spoilers about what happens to Laurie, but I think anyone who loves the original Halloween and its characters will think what they did with her in this movie is crap and only put her in here for the sake of having Laurie in it.

The characters are plastic. Even by the end of the movie when you get to know all of them a little bit, you don't care enough about them to want to see them escape the wrath of Mike Myers. In fact, you'll probably look forward to their demise at his hands. That's how flat and/or despicable these characters are. Even the lead role doesn't have much personality. She's nice and smart and decent, just like Laurie was in fact, but somehow she doesn't have much personality. I don't think her character was developed enough, otherwise she could have made a good heroine. The rest of the characters are people you pretty much hope get killed off, especially the tech lady played by Tyra Banks and most of the kids that tour the haunted house. Obnoxious people, hastily made characters. And Busta Rhymes plays the typical black dude with a boisterous personality. Not a bad acting job, but what a typical cliché character.

The technology is another factor. Another case of fusing horror with the fancy gimmick of modern technology (or what was modern in 2002 anyways). Just because we have things like reality shows and phone-texting nowadays does not mean it will make a horror movie any scarier, or realistic, or better at all. Having people emailing and playing on their phones and all in the movie takes away from the good old-fashioned terror you get from something as simple as a lurking shadow or the gleam of a butcher knife.

There's a couple of notably cool things in the movie, like when Freddy dresses up like Mike Myers while Mike is there in the flesh and you see two Mikes walking one behind the other. Well that was more funny than anything. The scene with the bong was funny too. And the murder scenes are alright and in typical Mike Myers fashion, but otherwise Resurrection bombs as a horror film and leaves you yet again with no closure, except this time you wouldn't really want to see another sequel.