HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION
By Raymond Knowby
They got Rick Rosenthal back (director, HALLOWEEN II), and so far he’s the only man to helm two pictures in this love and hate mess of ongoing sequels. Depressingly, this doesn’t do one damn bit of good, either, since this landmark disaster hits rock bottom to score the coveted cooked turkey award.
According to the marketing campaign, they also try to make you believe Jamie Lee Curtis is in this movie, but don’t get willingly on that sucker train (she’s there for about five minutes in the opening just to get popped off like a celebrity guest star in a made-for-tv murder mystery). Seriously? After all that work and getting all this way in the story, she just goes out like a little bitch? What a huge middle finger to the dedicated fanbase, most of who showed up to push the mediocre H20 into the black to greenlight this infuriating mockery.
What you actually get is Busta Rhymes being a homey television host for a live webcast reality show that puts a bunch of teens in the Myers dwelling to spend the night uncovering clues to his myth and whereabouts. Some of these are planted beforehand by the crooked opportunist, and some of them are genuine, thanks to the actual boogeyman showing up to infiltrate and knock off the contestants in cookie cutter fashion. This is really awful–why are they casting rappers in these movies? It’s SCREAM again, just like the last one, but now melded to THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT type camera work to give it that “found footage” trend. All those little things I wanted to learn since Carpenter’s first two masterful entries (like how can he SEE? Did he grow his fucking eyes back?) are still sidestepped. We get little tidbits of him being an abused child, but not enough to generate any newfound interest. Michael’s shrouded motivation was all we ever really needed, and with Pleasence deceased and Curtis now wasted, where else is there to go? Even the plot arc with his neice has been fully ditched.
The studio couldn’t figure out a course of action next, so instead said “fuck it” and gave the captain’s hat over to Rob Zombie for a full frontal rebooting.