Rating:

Halloween H20—despite having a premise that immediately sends up red flags—turned out to be a pretty awesome movie. In fact, it is easily the best of the Halloween sequels. Sure, it discarded the continuity established in movies 4, 5 and 6, but the promise that was shown by the pretty good Halloween 4 was squandered by 5 and 6 anyway so I wasn’t too sad about that. Things came full circle, Laurie Strode became the hunter rather than the hunted and she got genuine revenge on her psychotic, bemasked brother. And it ended in such a way that it would have been a truly satisfying conclusion to the entire series. Then along came Halloween: Resurrection and fucked all that up in a big, bad way.

From the very beginning, you know the movie is gonna be a bad one. The definitive end of Michael Meyers we’d seen in the previous movie was discarded and made into a big misunderstanding. Though the title suggests that Meyers might be resurrected, nothing so grand is needed; instead we’re told that he never even died and really Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) had mistakenly killed some other dude. It’s the kind of poorly executed cheat that would make Kathy Bates get pissed off and break your legs.

Sadly, that’s not even the worst thing about the beginning. This little prologue where we learn that the last movie was a waste of our time also shows that Laurie, who had evolved into one bad-ass bitch in Halloween H20, was so distressed by the fact that she killed the wrong dude that she was put into an institution, where she spends her days and nights staring out the window waiting for Michael to return. Which he does, of course, and before the movie is five minutes old he’s killed Laurie. Yeah, you read that right: Michael Meyers gets the best of Laurie Strode and kills her dead right at the beginning of the picture. It’s exactly the opposite of what we want to see in a Halloween movie.

It’d be hard to say the movie only gets worse from there, but it definitely stays at least that bad. Some sort of internet TV show is going to give a bunch of college kids cameras and have them search the abandoned (OR IS IT?) Meyers house looking for clues as to what made the kid go bad and become a stabby little bastard. The producers of the show have secretly loaded the house with all kinds of fake spooky instruments of child abuse to make sure their viewers get the goods, but as a result, we don’t learn anything about Michael…which we don’t want to do anyway! What a terrible device to hang your story on. Remember how in all the other movies, Donald Pleasence is constantly screaming about how Michael is pure evil, with nothing inside him and black empty eyes? Remember that exchange in the original picture?

LAURIE: It was the boogeyman.
DR. LOOMIS: As a matter of fact, it was.

The boogeyman! That’s what he is, nothing more, and your audience already knows it. We know he’s just an evil killing machine and nothing made him that way (except, possibly, a dumb druid ritual in one of the sequels this movie ignores).

Anyhow, some kids go into the house. I don’t know who they were. Now, I don’t mean I don’t remember the characters’ names like in most slasher movies. In many a Friday the 13^th picture, we don’t specifically remember the characters themselves, as they’re basically just there to get knifed, but we at least remember which standard types were present. Let’s consider the horror movie The Ruins: in it you had the Brunette Girl, the Blonde Girl, the Clean-Cut Kid, the Shaggy Kid, and the Foreigner. That’s okay. We see these types and we know what they are. But Halloween: Resurrection goes so far wrong that I not only don’t remember what types were in the movie but I can’t even recall how many people were in the house. There was a girl and another girl, who were completely interchangeable. There was a guy who liked cooking. Then, there may have been as many as five others, but I honestly don’t know. I can’t even try to figure it out by counting the deaths, because the death scenes—the slasher movie’s stock in trade—had nothing whatsoever to recommend them. I watched the fuckin’ thing last night and I have no idea what went on.

So: some people go to a house, most (all? I don’t remember or care) of them get killed, but Michael escapes (or maybe he didn’t? see above), and everything about the movie sucks a fat one. Also there were some kids at a Halloween party, and they sent text messages a lot. I mean a lot.

The very existence of this movie enrages me. It would be bad enough if it were just a terrible movie. But it goes beyond that. It undermines the satisfying end that Halloween H20 provided and offers this load of garbage instead. Then, the next movie in the series was a remake that started the franchise all over again. So why was this needed? Why couldn’t they have left the original Halloween run, which started with so much promise, with a worthy last word? Why ruin all that by trying to continue a series that had breathed its last?

Will there ever come a time when Hollywood stops ruining everything I love?

If you don’t like Halloween: Resurrection, then you will also totally hate:

Halloween (2007)

If You Hated This, You Will Also Totally Hate:

• Halloween in September
• Halloween (2007)
• Transformers 2 Has at Least Two Robot Balls
• Biologist Expelled from Ben Stein’s “Expelled”
• Black Christmas