MadCap's Reel Thoughts - "Halloween: Resurrection" (2002)

Well...it's time.

Trick or treat, motherfucker.

. . .yeah, that line is still stupid almost twenty years later.

Halloween: Resurrection is a film that really breaks the formula of the Halloween franchise in that it's...not really a Halloween film. Okay, it is...for about the first ten minutes or so. After surviving the massacre at Hillcrest Academy and decapitating Michael Myers, Laurie Strode is now in an asylum beause she apparently didn't kill Michael...but a paramedic whose larynx Michael crushed. This is, of course, how he was able to survive an intense vehicle crash, still be conscious enough to try to reach Laurie even after being pinned by said vehicle, and (if he was that coherent) did nothing to make himself seem like someone other than Michael Myers including taking off the damn mask.

As you can already tell, I hate this twist. It's possibly the most lazy and contrived reason to continue a series that already had a satisfying conclusion. Laurie Strode had conquered her monster and saved the day, end of. We have Kevin Williamson to thank for this, unfortunately, him having done uncredited touch ups on the script to H20 and having given the paramedic idea to long-time Halloween producer Moustapha Akkad.

Even Michael can't believe this crap.

And he went with it.

And it sucked.

This almost caused Jamie Lee Curtis to leave filming for H20, apparently wanting it to have been a definitive end to the series...except Moustapha Akkad apparently had an actual legal restriction on Michael Myers being killed off.

. . .no, really. That's a thing, apparently.

Anyway, Laurie has been in an asylum in a near-catatonic state since the incident in question. On Halloween night in 2001, Michael has returned and she is prepared for him. We get some good scenes of Michael stalking around the asylum in a Halloween II-esque manner (which is fitting, seeing as director Rick Rosenthal also directed that movie) and getting a few kills in before Laurie springs her trap and captures Michael. He starts to use identical mannerisms and gestures as the paramedic from the end of H20 - something he couldn't possibly have seen given how those events played out, but never mind - in an attempt to trick Laurie. This works.

She dies.

That's right, Laurie Strode is killed by Michael Myers, stabbed in the chest and promising to see him in Hell before she falls from the roof of the asylum in a dramatic slow-motion shot. I will give them credit that this film is at least more respectful than her getting killed off-screen by car wreck in the previous continuity. I promise you, that's the last bit of praise I'm going to be able to give this film.

Cut to one year later. A bunch of unlikeable assholes are heading into the Myers House (which is somehow still standing in Haddonfield) for a reality TV show. Yeah, it seems remarkably quaint in this day and age but it was a big thing in the early 2000s with shows like Survivor and The Amazing Race on the air that are still on the air even today. Head by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and his girlfriend Nora (Tyra Banks) the show "Dangertainment" will be broadcasting to the internet live from the Myers House on Halloween night.

Behold our meatsacks for the evening!

It's the union of the Halloween franchise and mass media that was being broadcast by John Carpenter himself from the very first frame of the original...if you're insane.

Several college students have apparently auditioned for Dangertainment, such as Sara Moyer (Bianca Kajlich - yet another name that makes me glad I do these reviews via text), Starbuck from the Battlestar Galactica relaunch (Katee Sackhoff), and the Rookie of the Year (Thomas Ian Nicholas). There are other people...but they're all either boring, unlikeable, or boring and unlikeable. Trapped in the Myers House for one night, there is someone hiding in the basement who is naturally more than a little irked that he's got a bunch of frat house assholes squatting on his property.

You see, my dear reader, my joke about this film not being a Halloween film is fantastically on target, because this just isn't a Halloween film...it's a latter-day Friday the 13th film. Now, we haven't gotten to those films just yet (but we will), but anyone who has seen them will see what I mean. They're a bunch of unlikeable assholes with no real personality or character who exist to be sacks of meat to be carved up by the killer. When people talk about how they don't like slasher films, films like Halloween: Resurrection are the ones I think they picture in their heads.

I will say it, though...it is the best Friday the 13th film ever...that stars Michael Myers.

. . .and it sucks, as previously established, so there are no points to it in the plus column. I was going to make a joke that the film should be called Halloween: Repetition, but it's not really repeating anything from its own franchise. There's no family member of Michael's to be hunted down (despite some theories concerning Sara), none of the kills really show any creativity or thought beyond one mirror smash one that was done way better in Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (again, ripping off the wrong franchise). Here's your final spoiler warning, because I have to talk about the ending.

Boring and unlikeable

After Freddie is seemingly mercifully put out of our misery in the movie, he comes back...and proceeds to fight Michael in the burning...garage?...of the Myers House. Michael is seemingly killed. It is here, over his body, that Freddie gives us the final monologue and the summation of what this film is. This is the moment that it's all been leading up to.

Remember in the original Halloween, the incredibly powerful monologue delivered by Donald Pleasance where Doctor Loomis spoke of the nature of Michael's evil, how he spent so much time trying to reach him before realizing what he was and doing everything he could to lock him away? How he looked into those eyes - the blackest eyes, the Devil's eyes - and saw pure and simple evil. It's powerful stuff. Something that really speaks to Loomis' character and his crusade to defeat this great and terrible evil that fate has brought him face to face with.

Busta Rhymes, naturally, gives us a monologue that deserves a place right alongside it as one of the greatest lines ever delivered in a Halloween film or in any other. Just for fun, I have both linked the scene on YouTube and will transcribe it here because it's just...so amazing.

"Michael Myers is not a soundbite, spin-off, tie-in, some celebrity scandal. Michael Myers is a killer shark in baggy-ass overalls who gets his kicks off of killing everything and everyone that he comes across. That's all."

Really...I have no words, so take it from Jodie Foster in the movie Contact: right here.

Oh, and Michael's not dead by the way. What? The guy was blown up in Halloween II and only got mild redness and irritation for his trouble, what's a little house fire going to do to him?

Stabbed repeatedly, blown up, beaten repeatedly, shot, none of that worked.
Michael's true weakness? Very bad kung fu.

As you can tell, I really don't like this movie at all. Almost everything about it just makes me either irritated or just roll my eyes at the utter ridiculousness. It rips off entirely the wrong franchise, doesn't do it particularly well, and then feels like it has this big message about the shallow nature of reality television that it hasn't set up and hasn't earned. It also makes the pretty much unforgivable sin of killing off Jamie Lee Curtis in the first ten minutes and still having the gall to use her face to promote the movie as if she's in the entire thing.

That's not even getting into how TYRA BANKS was listed in the credits before she was.

And, ultimately, it was all for naught anyway. Instead of continuing on with the original series as was the plan, we got the Rob Zombie-helmed reboot in 2007, and you all know how much I loved that one! I tell ya now folks, no hyperbole...the only reason I don't hate this film more is because I know what comes after it. Resurrection absolutely sucks and probably would have been even more ironically named given that it very well could have killed the franchise.

I almost wish it had.

Next Halloween, we'll finally take a look at the Blumhouse productions, starting with Halloween (2018). Do I like it? Well, you'll have to wait until then to find out, but I can tell you one thing - it's way better than this movie!

Halloween: Resurrection is brought to us by Dimension Films and Miramax.