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Halloween: Resurrection
2002 - R - 94 Mins.
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| Director: Rick Rosenthal | | Producer: Moustapha Akkad | | Written By: Larry Brand and Sean Hood | | Starring: Brad Loree, Busta Rhymes, Bianca Kajlich, Sean Patrick Thomas, Tyra Banks, Jamie Lee Curtis |
| Review by: Jake Cremins |
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In fact, now that you've seen this *picture* there's no reason to see the film.
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The opening shot of 'Halloween: Resurrection' is really good -- great, almost. The Steadicam glides down an institutional hallway, darkened by night, and on the soundtrack we hear Jamie Lee Curtis' haggard voice in the narration: "You've heard of the tunnel. The one we all go through sooner or later. At the end, there's a door. And waiting for you on the other side is either Heaven or Hell."
Then we reach the end of the hall, and she whispers, "This is that door," and the camera goes through a viewing window to show Curtis herself, sitting in her room in a mental asylum. First we notice how eerily she looks like she did in the original 'Halloween,' with her limp straight hair hanging down on either side of her face, and the same timid stillness she had when she was a teenager. Then we get a better look, and we can see how the years have marked her, and the way she is staring into space with a kind of shell shock. She looks truly haunted.
If you're a fan of Curtis and her role in the 'Halloween' movies (I am) then this will be a great moment, and I advise you to treasure it. As an opening shot for this movie, alas, it is a very bad choice, because it inspires hopes and expectations that are not only unfulfilled but actually seem to be mocked, so unbelievably awful is 'Halloween: Resurrection.' The trailer for this movie cannily places Curtis near the end, implying that she appears for a climactic showdown with Michael Myers, but it's a game of cinematic bait-and-switch. Her role is merely an extended cameo, which first provides a shaky explanation for how Michael could have possibly survived the end of 'Halloween H20' (I will not reveal this, so you can be insulted by it yourself), and then gives her a lame and inglorious farewell five minutes later. For the movie to tempt us with the possibility that Laurie Strode will be the main character, and then replace her with Busta Rhymes and a group of sub-moronic teenagers, is cruelty on the level of the Marquis de Sade.
The main business of the film concerns said teenagers, who have signed up to stay in the abandoned Myers house on Halloween night as part of a live webcast. You'd think it would be pretty boring to watch some kids poke around an old house for hour after hour, so Rhymes (the webcast producer) has placed some haunted-house-type surprises throughout -- a key in one room that opens the door to another, a flimsy wall in the basement that falls aside to reveal phony moldering corpses, that sort of thing. I mention this not because it is important, but because the movie is so starved for plot and intelligence that it pretends this is important. Yes, there is an entire subplot about how betrayed everyone feels when they discover that the producer put stuff in the house before they arrived. Faced with such a shocking example of duplicitousness and greed, several of them loudly announce that they're quitting. I am not making this up.
Finally Michael Myers arrives and the heads begin to roll. Soon only one girl is left, and to no one's surprise it's the quiet one who wasn't sure she wanted to be here in the first place. When this character is given the only scenes before Halloween night and is told by someone in these scenes that "you're not like the others," that's a sure sign the filmmakers aren't even trying anymore. Anyway, there is a very long chase scene that had me thinking of the original 'Halloween.' In that movie, the first thing Jamie Lee Curtis did upon meeting Michael Myers was run for the front door. In this one, the girl climbs out of windows, runs up stairs, crawls on the roof, and generally explores every part of the house that isn't the front door, while an Internet friend sends her helpful advice on one of those Blackberry portable email devices. Hint to friend: when the Myers house is revealed to have a basement about as large as that in the average medieval castle, "HE'S IN THE HALLWAY" is not very helpful.
Since Busta Rhymes figures so heavily in the finale, I should mention now that he is more annoying than all of the other characters put together. He accomplishes this by constantly talking at all times, about everything, and adding "up in this m-----f----" to the end of every sentence that could possibly be eligible. When he is alone and there is no one else to talk to, he keeps up a running commentary to himself on what he is doing at the moment. I'm not kidding. He *never* shuts up. By the time it was all over and the ambulances had arrived I thought his opportunities had been exhausted, but no, he is cornered by reporters and delivers a monologue so laughably stupid it sets a new standard for laughably stupid monologues. But gee golly, at least he's learned of the evils of putting used coloring books in musty old houses.
This is the worst 'Halloween' sequel yet -- yes, worse even than 'The Curse of Michael Myers.'
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