Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later concluded with an action as seemingly irreversible as it was undeniably gratifying. 20 years after Michael Myers escaped from Smith's Grove Warren County Sanitarium, where he had been confined since the age of six for the brutal murder of his teenage sister, and instigated a homecoming massacre in Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night in 1978, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who was revealed to be his long-lost baby sister, finally brought her homicidal older brother's reign of unmotivated terror to an end with one swift swing of a fire axe, literally cutting the head off of her lifelong monster. 

It was a fitting conclusion to the Halloween franchise as a whole and Laurie's arc in particular. No longer could this faceless force of destruction plague her nightmares, and no longer could hack filmmakers milk Michael Myers' mythology to churn out another uninspired and unnecessary sequel to further complicate what was initially a blissfully simple story about a silent, masked serial killer hacking his way through a suburban town of unsuspecting teenagers for no discernible reason. After all, while Michael can withstand bullets, there's no way he can grow another head, right? 

Unfortunately, money talks much louder than a fire axe, and screenwriters Larry Brand and Sean Hood have concocted a way to revive Michael when leaving him to wither away in a cold grave would have been the much smarter—but less financially beneficial—option. 

Three years after Laurie assumed she had decapitated Michael in a field, she has now been relieved of her prestigious position as the headmistress of Hillcrest Academy and, similar to her brother, institutionalized at Grace Andersen Sanitarium. Why? For defending herself and protecting other innocent people against the living embodiment of pure, unadulterated evil? Well, as conveniently explained by two nurses, who are hired to bring Laurie her medication and, more importantly, verbally rehash the climactic events of H20 in conjunction with newly added, recontextualizing flashbacks of Michael (Brad Loree) and a previously unseen paramedic, Laurie didn't actually kill Michael Myers. 

As an excuse to figuratively reattach Michael's head onto his neck, Brand and Hood audaciously decapitate the definitive, cathartic ending of H20 with the most illogical, contrived, and most unforgivably of all, character-assassinating twist in the history of the Halloween franchise. By the end of H20, Laurie was an avenging angel who completed the job that Dr. Loomis had started 20 years earlier when he fired six bullets into his former patient; by the start of Resurrection, she has been reconfigured into an unintentional murderer of a father of three. 

The premise goes that after Laurie stabbed Michael repeatedly into falling off the second floor of her boarding school onto a cafeteria table, a paramedic arrived on the scene and examined Michael's unconscious body. When he had his back turned, Michael came to and strangled the paramedic, crushing his larynx. After, Michael swapped clothes, transferring his mask and boiler suit to the paramedic and donning the latter's uniform. The man that Laurie decapitated was the paramedic. That's why he couldn't speak up for himself, and why he was struggling to remove the mask. But how did nobody notice a paramedic walking into the woods while wielding a butcher knife? 

In Halloween H20, Jamie Lee Curtis made a triumphant return to the role that made her a bona fide scream queen and a Hollywood icon, looking absolutely stunning and badass at 39 in her dark gray, long-sleeved knit pullover sweater and short, spiky pixie cut; in Halloween: Resurrection, Curtis looks trashed, sitting in a hospital room, the color drained from her lifeless face. In both appearance and character, the filmmakers betray this once-formidable heroine. 

Returning behind the camera for the first time in 21 years after directing Halloween 2 is Rick Rosenthal, and the passage of two decades has not diluted his fascination with irrationally desolate hospitals in the slightest. After two security guards are summarily dismissed from their positions via a decapitation and throat-slitting, Grace Andersen Sanitarium appears utterly bereft of both patients and staff, save one overweight lunatic named Harold Trumble (Gus Lynch) who wears a John Wayne Gacy mask (really a generic clown mask), resides in an inexplicably unlocked room, and rhapsodizes about serial killers. 

Straight from the opening scene, the plot holes mount. Laurie has been caught on the roof several times, leading to the doctors labeling her as a suicide risk owing to her guilt over accidentally killing an innocent family man. How is she getting out of her room and onto the roof in the first place? Is the security at this sanitarium that deplorable? Are the door locks that ineffective? Furthermore, how in the name of Samhain did Laurie manage to construct a booby trap on the roof without anyone noticing? Worse, after she utilizes said booby trap to hang Michael upside down by his ankle after he tracks her down, she makes the brainless mistake of facilitating her own overdramatized and anticlimactic death by trying to remove his mask to ensure that this time, she kills the right man. 

As for the aforementioned security guards, one is a stereotypical fat-bodied gentleman named Willie Haines (Dan Joffre), who stops at a vending machine to compensate for the dinner he skipped with a bag of donuts, naturally. While stuffing his face with his energy-boosting dinner, Willie hears his partner, Franklin Munroe (Brent Chapman), scream, and enters the basement to investigate. After discovering Franklin's severed head in a washing machine, a panting Willie backs away and trips over his partner's headless corpse, which wasn't present when Willie first entered the basement. Did Michael silently place it there while Willie was peering into the washing machine? He couldn't have, because he was hiding above Willie on the ceiling? So we'll just chalk that sudden materialization up to sloppy directing on Rosenthal's part.

One year later, a sextet of college students—psychology student Sara Moyer (Bianca Kajlich), her best friend, Jen Danzig (Katee Sackhoff), budding chef Rudy Grimes (Sean Patrick Thomas), music major Jim Morgan (Luke Kirby), critical studies major Donna Chang (Daisy McCrackin), and Bill Woodlake (Thomas Ian Nicholas)—is selected to appear as contestants for an internet reality show called Dangertainment, directed by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and his girlfriend, Nora Winston (Tyra Banks). For one night and a significant but undisclosed profit, the contestants are required to simply explore the abandoned childhood home of Michael Myers in search of answers as to why he turned to a life of indiscriminate savagery. 

For them, this project represents an opportunity for overnight internet fame; for Freddie, who has secretly rigged the house with plastic corpses made in Taiwan and lurks in the hallways in a Michael Myers costume to scare his winners, it represents a cheap opportunity to entertain the brainless viewers and put a great deal of food on his and Nora's plates. Little do any of them know that Michael has been living in his home for the past 20 years, and he doesn't take terribly kindly to opportunistic intruders.

Even though Halloween: Resurrection is part of the back-to-basics timeline established by H20, divorced entirely from the Cult of Thorn claptrap, it actually manages to outdo The Curse of Michael Myers as the current nadir of its franchise nonetheless. From the jump, it features the stupidest excuse for a plot to date. Uninspired, lazy, and plodding, the standard 90-minute runtime couldn't pass quickly enough. The central concept envisioned by Larry Brand and Sean Hood—six stereotypical wannabe clout-chasers aimlessly wander an abandoned, rundown house in halfhearted pursuit of clues for the origin of Michael Myers' evil—is so inherently excruciating and devoid of interest that it's downright laughable to consider that anyone at home would actually tune in to watch. 

Perhaps aware of the weightlessness of their own concept, Brand and Hood overload the corners of their desolate house with every teen slasher cliché known to man: a boring, horny couple playing hard to get wander downstairs into a basement to officiate their mutual attraction, falsely confident that they're free of cameras; after Jim climbs back upstairs, Donna hears a noise emanating from the other side of the wall and decides to explore the sewers on her own; every single door is locked from the outside so Michael can always get in, but his victims are trapped (did Michael or Freddie lock the doors, and if so, how?); Jen screams to lure her friends into a bedroom, in which she hides in a corner, and when Sara enters, Jen emits a piercing, prolonged scream to scare her; while cameraman and Spielberg wannabe Charlie Albans (Brad Sihvon) takes the leg of a camera tripod into his throat, Nora busies herself by making a latte and talking to Freddie on her cellphone, looking back at the monitor only after Charlie's corpse has been dragged out of view; Sara can't help letting out an instinctual scream in response to her pen pal, Myles Barton (Ryan Merriman), explicitly texting her, "Don't scream!"; the bottom stairs are brittle so that feet can fall through and become stuck; Jen and Rudy pass time by smoking weed through a bong; the climactic confrontation ends in a Frankensteinian fire, after which police officers arrive in bucketloads now that they're no longer useful. 

Just as Freddie acknowledges that America doesn't want to see people wandering around an empty house all night and compensates with tawdry razzle-dazzle, so do Rosenthal and his writers seem to be cognizant of the emptiness of their story, and fill their hallways with fake scares in a desperate bid to keep viewers invested. Specifically, they seem to get off on fake-scaring Sara in particular with inanimate objects bursting out of bedroom closets. As Sara explores one, a nude mannequin in a hairless Michael mask pops out among the wardrobe. Sara screams and falls. The door behind her shuts. Rudy punches a fist through the slats to free her. How did the door shut, and why couldn't Rudy just open it by its handle? How could it lock? In another instance, after Sara opens a closet door, a high chair slides out on its own. Are these objects possessed? Does Michael possess telekinesis? 

Two hapless souls are written without a shred of self-preservation. After Jen comes across Bill's corpse dangling from an attic hatch, she screams and runs to the top of the stairs, looking down at Sara, Rudy, and Jim at the front door. Rather than running downstairs to join them, she stands still. Michael emerges from a bedroom and closes in on her. Again, rather than running for safety, Jen stands still, passively allowing Michael to run his butcher knife through her neck. Likewise, after Michael stabs his knife into a wall, Jim ignores Rudy's warning to run and stands still, allowing Michael to crush his skull between his hands. Perhaps the most head-scratching and disappointing character choice is committed by Michael himself, who allows Freddie—thinking the man before him is Charlie the dead camera boy—to admonish him for wearing his costume and follows Freddie's command to leave.

The characters are one-dimensional, uniformly unsympathetic stereotypes whose jobs, majors, and wardrobes dictate their wafer-thin personalities. Rudy is a chef, you see, so every word out of his mouth is related to food. The thing he's most excited about seeing in the Myers home? The kitchen. He rambles on about the potentially lethal effects of a poor diet, attributing Michael's aggression to an excess of protein and insufficient zinc. Jim is a music major, so he wears a black leather jacket, has curly black hair, and is obsessed with having sex with Donna, the one who's seemingly too smart for him. "You know, Donna, you got great legs. What time do they open?" As she fends off his advances, Jim asks, "Donna, when are you gonna stop thinking with your mind and start thinking with your body?" 

Surprisingly, Donna is probably the most annoying character of all, certainly the most egotistical, hypocritical, and pathetic. Because she's a critical studies major, she thinks that she's smarter than everyone else, and so speaks almost exclusively in condescending, pretentious terms and phrases: explaining the difference between "continuously" and "continually," criticizing Jim as a "lothario," asserting that "screwing a music major would be tantamount to lesbianism," and saying "Existence precedes essence" as her form of sexy talk. Despite McCrackin's seductive presence, I was ready to impale Donna on a metal spike long before Michael did the deed. 

Jen is the sexy, free-spirited, lighthearted trollop with the obnoxious habit of pranking her friends by hiding in a corner and screaming behind them at the top of her lungs. At least in her final scene, her scream is warranted, and it's the last one she'll ever emit. Sara is the quiet, reserved outsider and helpless damsel in distress who has to be rescued by a man, so her survival is practically guaranteed. Bill is a pervert who unwantedly caresses Jen's shoulder, grabs her by her ass when her foot crashes through a step, and tries to smooth-talk her into flashing her breasts under the guise of helping her launch a career as an internet celebrity.

Freddie is a fan of a fictional martial artist named Wat Chun Lee, so when he squares off against Michael, he mimics Lee's karate skills to take him down with far-fetched ease. Apparently, Freddie is able to inherit his idol's ability simply by watching him in a movie. We should all be so lucky. In a potential slice of self-reflexivity, Freddie serves as a despicable stand-in for the filmmakers of Halloween: Resurrection, setting up his contestants with fraudulent scare tactics to give the masses cheap entertainment and admitting his preference for financial greed over the wellbeing of his cast with a gleeful lack of remorse or shame. Nora is his unwaveringly supportive girlfriend and accomplice. 

Of the entire ensemble, the only actor who submits a worthwhile contribution is Katee Sackhoff, who injects a degree of energy and sex appeal into the witless and boring proceedings. As the final girl of Resurrection, Bianca Kajlich is flat and unconvincing in her expressions of fear, helplessness, desperation, and anger. Her line delivery of "Deckard, he's killing all of us"—which leads to the aforementioned "She really is a very talented actress" assertion—is atrocious, topped off with a whiny, forced cry. Her delivery of "Oh shit" after her chainsaw runs out of gas lacks even a scintilla of panic, sounding as though she just received a failing grade on a school exam. Her scream when she tosses the chainsaw at Michael is pathetic. 

In Halloween H20, rapper-slash-actor LL Cool J gave a surprisingly competent and endearing performance as a security guard aspiring to break into the art of erotic fiction. Perhaps inspired by Cool J's success as a supporting character, Rosenthal cast Busta Rhymes in the lead role in an attempt to draw in black audiences and fans of his rap. Sadly, the lightning didn't strike twice. For starters, Freddie is an obnoxious loudmouth so self-absorbed and self-satisfied that he literally pats himself on the back for sweet-talking Sara out of dropping out of his show with on-the-spot inspirational platitudes. Secondly, Rhymes' incessant karate chopping and Wat Chun Lee impersonations are out of place. His one-liners are uniformly cringe-making in their overreliance on Halloween expressions: "Trick or treat, motherfucka!" "Hey, Mikey, happy fuckin' Halloween!" 

As for the subtitle, "Resurrection," it seems to apply to Freddie more than Michael. After being stabbed twice in the back, a kill for which I was eminently grateful, Freddie somehow regains consciousness and reappears in time to save Sara from a burning garage. His resurrection is as disappointing as it is inexplicable: how did he survive two stabs to the back and retain the strength to beat Michael with a shovel, electrocute him with an electric cord, carry Sara over his shoulders, and continue to trash talk Michael on his way out?

In a silly attempt to emulate the fun, immersive, communal experience of watching a horror film, Brand and Hood intersperse their primary trapped-in-a-house storyline with a subplot about a rapidly growing group of costumed partygoers, led by Myles, who assemble in a computer room to watch the live broadcast of Dangertainment. Myles represents the audience surrogate, the sweet, loyal, sensitive viewer who recognizes and is disturbed by the authenticity of the horrors unfolding onscreen, while those surrounding him represent the raucous crowd who watches horror films out of morbid curiosity, but is more interested in making fun of them than engaging with and rooting for the characters. 

At first, these people are contemptuous skeptics who assume that the violence is staged, criticizing the "effects" as "so fake," laughing gleefully at a screaming female victim's suffering, cheering on the killer. Then, once they realize the reality of the horror, they vicariously join Sara's side, screaming at her (from behind the computer) to get out of the house and trying to warn her of Michael's whereabouts.

Whether written or improvised, the lines of these witnesses are so stupid and corny. "This isn't funny anymore, guys!" whines some unseen background girl. "Now's her chance," says some blond dude. "She really is a very talented actress," opines one blond bimbo in a kitty costume, who has clearly never witnessed a talented actress in a horror film because Bianca Kajlich is terrible. When Michael smashes his way through a barricaded bedroom door, the audience gasps in unison. They act as if they're actually watching a horror film.

Despite being a source of unconditional support and comfort to Sara, a girl he's never met in person, Myles registers as a plot device to guide Sara to safety and alert her to Michael's whereabouts so she knows which rooms to avoid, and he has the eye-rolling habit of punctuating his basic one-line text messages with exclamation points, as if he needs those to convey to Sara the gravity of her own situation.

Visually, Halloween: Resurrection is atrocious and consistently unwatchable. David Geddes frequently alternates between conventional third-person cinematography and the fuzzy, incoherent, shaky perspective of the cameras wired to the characters' clothing and mounted on the walls. The violence and action scenes are so murky that it's difficult to ascertain what part of the house a character is in and through whose eyes we're witnessing a scene unfold. Rosenthal appears to be catering to the Blair Witch Project crowd, utilizing his premise of characters partaking in a reality show to cash in on the found-footage boom of the early 2000s, but Resurrection represents the worst version of the subgenre.

As the sole plus of this eighth installment, at least Rosenthal and Geddes understand that Michael is more of a personification of the boogeyman than a flesh-and-blood psychopath, and they make extensive use of shadows. Almost as often as he highlights Michael's white, expressionless William Shatner mask in close-ups, Geddes films Michael in shadows projected onto walls as he skulks throughout his home, surrounded by moody dark blue lighting. In an early striking composition, after Michael slits Willie's throat in the basement, Geddes composes a motionless shadow of Michael standing above his corpse with his upraised butcher knife. This shot should have been used as the official poster for Halloween: Resurrection. 

If Michael Myers could survive the ultimate demise of a beheading, then he can certainly recover from the minor inconvenience of an electrical fire. Rosenthal and his writers leave the door wide open for yet another sequel by ending Resurrection on the most clichéd and predictable of cliffhangers: the jarring opening of the villain's eyes. As a young female coroner tentatively commences examining the charred and seemingly dead body of Michael, editor Robert A. Ferretti cuts to a close-up of Michael's eyes suddenly opening, accompanied by a shrill scare chord. 

Fortunately, musician-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie wouldn't take the bait, recognizing that the only way to revive this franchise and restore a sense of dignity to it wasn't to continue where Resurrection left off, but to return to the original screenplay with a radical remake. The subtitle for Halloween 8 should have been "Extinction" because that's the fate this movie threatened its franchise with.

2.4/10