Review #91: Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

This review was originally written in October 2020.

October Movie Review #8- Halloween: Resurrection

Oh no.

Oh, NO.

This movie... was bad. Like, VERY bad. I would love to start off with the good parts of my review so then I can get to the bad, but... I really don't know what good there is. The first ten minutes was.... good-ish, but it had basically nothing to do with the rest of the film and I'm sure was only there to explain away the ending of the previous film while still keeping Jamie Lee Curtis on the movie poster (since I'm sorry, but Busta Rhymes just doesn't have the star power to put butts in seats for this one). The rest of the movie was just bad, bad, bad.

I was trying to explain to a co-worker what exactly it is about this movie that makes it look so specific to the four-or-five-year period in which it came out (1998-2003), but every big-studio movie that came out during that period has the same look and feel to it. This one is no exception. It's got so many tropes that just look so stupid in retrospect- Yahoo Chat Rooms, Reality TV being streamed on the internet, and did I mention Busta Rhymes is one of the main characters? (I assumed he'd be a cameo, but no, he's one of the two surviving protagonists.)

The Reality Show plotline is just so incredibly stupid. Freddy (Busta Rhymes) hires a handful of college kids to go into the (still standing, still abandoned, after thirty-five years) Myers house with live-streaming cameras, under the pretense that they're going to be "looking for clues to why Michael went crazy". Anyone who knows anything about Reality TV knows that Freddy planned some spooks and scares to keep things interesting, but somehow none of the college students realized this? (Like, to the point where, when they find out they're not conducting an actual criminal investigation, they all opt to just quit, even if it means not getting paid.) Not only is that INCREDIBLY stupid, but once Freddy reveals to them that this isn't real (on camera, mind you), he just tells them all to "play along". Like, why wasn't that their instruction from the beginning? WTF was the point of hiding that from them, instead of getting actors to put on the exact show he wanted to put on? It's so poorly-thought-out, but it's the character who thought it out poorly. Except a writer still thought it made for a good story, which means the story itself is what's bad.

And on that subject, the characters in this are TERRIBLE. I kid you not when I say that never in this series have I ever actively hated one of the protagonists- some of them were incredibly bizarre, like Paul Rudd's character in Halloween 6- but ten minutes into this one, I absolutely hated every one of them, and not a single one of them felt like a real person; rather, a single character trait that someone wrote a bunch of lines for. There's the guy whose entire character is that he likes food, there's the guy whose entire character is that he's horny, there's the girl whose entire character is that she wants to get famous- that's who we're working with here. The female "lead" (if you can call her that) is just as bad as the rest, with her only defining traits being that she screams when she gets scared, and she has a friend that she chats with online. That's literally all there is to her character.

I'd always felt like there was a point in the history of the Horror movie genre where films became less about the story and characters and became instead about rooting for the villain to kill all of the annoying characters off, but I assumed it was a gradual change and that you couldn't pinpoint exactly when and how it happened. And yet, I am now able to say with 100% certainty that it is a distinct shift that happened between 1998 and 2002, as it was not present in the last Halloween film but was in full force in this one.

I don't really have much else to say (besides good riddance) but I will mention that I've seen straight-to-DVD, shot-on-video schlock horror do the Reality TV That Goes Wrong plot better than this film did, and that's very, very sad. This was a stupid movie and we would all be better off if it didn't exist.

Overall Rating: 1/10 Forgotten Relatives of Michael Myers

Embarassing IMDB Trivia: The actress that played Sarah (the character whose only two traits included her ability to scream) couldn't actually scream on-camera and it had to be added in post