Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Halloween: Resurrection (2002) - Review


This is where the series just stopped caring again. Weird how they went through all the trouble to ignore most of the sequels with H20, then completely ruin it again in the next movie with series-ending amounts of stupidity.  I can't decide what's worse: the intro that concludes the story of Laurie Strode or the actual plot of the movie that revolves around a scary reality show that takes place in Micheal's old house.  OK, fine, it's the reality show stuff.

Nothing about this movie works.  The way they retcon Michael into surviving from his pretty definitive death in H20 is so stupid, so inane, so ridiculously convoluted that it really destroys the movie at the beginning.  Not that the reality show plot helps matters.  The acting is atrocious, with the exception of Jamie Lee Curtis's glorified cameo.  When Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks are your big stars, then you have a serious problem.  It wasn't so bad when LL Cool J was in H20 because he was actually pretty likable.  Not the case here.  Rhymes and Banks clearly aren't actors; they're more of an embarrassment.

It's surprising how bad the direction is too.  The director is Rick Rosenthal, who also directed Halloween 2, one of the better entries in the series.  Not that it was one of the tense ones, but somehow he's completely lost everything that could possibly make Halloween suspenseful.  Michael Myers is a scary concept, but this movie gets it all wrong by added completely incompetent camerawork on top of characters that we couldn't care about even if we wanted to.  It makes the whole movie pretty boring, despite having some "so bad it's good" ideas and line readings hidden in there somewhere.

Also, with Laurie out of the way, Myers doesn't really have a reason to exist anymore.  The little bit that they illuminated about the character is that he was trying to kill his siblings.  Now he has no reason to kill.  Okay, sure, idiotic people are doing a stupid reality show at his old house; maybe that's reason enough.  But it's really flimsy.  This is the perfect example of a sequel that had no business being made.  Oh, and Resurrection is the most generic title possible.  Coming soon: Halloween 9: This Time It's a Personal Resurrection.


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