Halloween: Resurrection

Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

Runtime: 94 minutes

Directed by: Rick Rosenthal

Starring: Bianca Kajlich, Sean Patrick Thomas, Busta Rhymes, Daisy McCrackin, Luke Kirby

From: Dimension Films

This is a movie with a very bad reputation. Somehow, I did not hate it. I'll never call it good by any means, but I did note hate it. Let me explain why in my Letterboxd review copied and pasted below:

I figured I should finish off my long weekend of movie watching (which did not go as planned but circumstances beyond my control happened) by watching this movie immediately after Halloween H20 late Monday night, as it was only the natural thing to do. It'll definitely be a long while before I feel like seeing the Rob Zombieween films, as those have toxic reputations. Then again, so does this movie. It certainly starts off on the wrong foot.

I always heard this was putrid and I did try to go in this with an open mind, but after that opening scene at the sanitarium where Jamie Lee Curtis delivers a less than memorable performance, the retcon they did makes absolute ZERO sense if you know what happens at the end of H20, then how that scene ends and something huge happens to legendary figure Laurie Strode and that moment is just ineptly done all around. It even has a “kiss” as an attempt to get an MTV Movie Award (I swear this is true; the director said as much)... not a good way to start this off. Yet, after that a lot of the movie wasn't as painful as I expected it to be.

I do have to admit that the general plot does seem ahead of its time. It's based off of reality TV years before it (unfortunately) became really popular, and this was years before you had those terrible “ghost reality shows” like Ghost Hunters, Paranormal State, Ghostly Encounters, and all that other fake crap (this movie was ahead of its time in saying that this crap was fake)... then there's the conceit of spending a night in the house of Michael Myers and everyone has a webcam on them as it's being broadcast on the Internet... that sounds like the making of a found footage movie, and note that I never want to see a found footage Halloween and if this had been found footage it would not have been any better.

Also, I am amused that this was supposed to come out late 2001 (before the dreaded reshoots happened; I understand there's plenty of deleted footage floating around) and I remember distinctly to that time... web broadcasts weren't common as many people still didn't have broadband at the time. In attention, there actually were some nice touches, such as people at a party becoming more and more interested in the web broadcast.

As for the story, it's pretty silly, to put it kindly. Credulity is strained at least a few times by various preposterous things or discoveries. Discovering that there's a dungeon below the basement in the Myers house is quite the revelation. Some of the acting is not great and most everything involving Busta Rhymes... yikes. Him interacting with Myers usually did not do Michael any favors, especially that ending. Other than the really bad moments I already mentioned, I thought this was at least great to laugh at and sometimes with. It was a change from the dull H20, even though I rate it the same as that.

I know that people were excited at the time that the director of Halloween 2 came back to the franchise to lead this; afterwards... it made you wonder how much of an influence Carpenter had on Halloween 2. Point is, this harmed the franchise and that's why Rob Zombie ended up with it, which I know many think is the worst of all the bad things that happened to this franchise. Even with Busta doing martial arts on Michael Myers, I somehow did not loathe this.