...one resurrection too many.
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In the 1930s and 40s Hollywood gave us the Frankenstein monster, Dracula, and the Wolfman. Time after time they kept coming back for more, despite their being burned, buried, shot, and staked. Finally, they died of their own accord, victims of overexposure and sequels that became steadily more repetitive and redundant as they went along. Today we have Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Krueger, all of them facing the same inevitable doom as their predecessors and for the same reasons.
"Halloween: Resurrection" is a good example. This, by my reckoning, is the eighth entry in a series that should have ended about six or seven sequels ago. You'll recall it all started promisingly in 1978 when writer-director John Carpenter set homicidal maniac Michael Myers loose to terrorize a small town on Halloween night. The film almost single-handedly started the entire slasher craze (OK, maybe with a little inspiration from Hitchcock's "Psycho" some eighteen years before), and slashers became a subgenre of horror that was imitated by countless clones thereafter and headed downhill really fast. By the time "Resurrection" came along in 2002, the "Halloween" series, long before abandoned by Carpenter, had degenerated almost to pure, gory camp.
As a horror-movie fan, I admit to having seen all the entries in the "Halloween" saga, even the nonsensical number-three, "Season of the Witch," that didn't have anything to do with the rest of the pictures. But that doesn't mean I thought any of them but the first one were any good; it just means I'm an optimist. Fans of Jamie Lee Curtis will be both pleased and annoyed that her character, Laurie Strode, is back--pleased that she's in the film at all; annoyed that, well, if you watch this thing, you'll find out.
You see, at the end of "Halloween: H20," Laurie was supposed to have killed Michael for good, but it was the wrong person, and Michael escaped again. Now, Laurie is locked away in a sanitarium, presumably having gone mad at the thought of her wrongful killing, but in reality she's patiently waiting for her brother Michael's return. Still, that's not what the movie is about.
The actual setup this time around has a group of college students invited to participate in a live Web broadcast to be spent all Halloween night in the old Myers house. The viewer can tell in an instant what's going to happen, and it does. In fact, it seems so obviously contrived and corny, the audience expects every minute for some clever twist to occur, some ironic turnaround to happen. Don't bet on it. The only purpose in these slasher flicks is to guess the order of the murders and to enjoy the gruesome creativity of the deaths. Yet even these small, guilty pleasures are made mundane by a script totally lacking in any innovative spark. I mean, not even its gimmick of "Halloween" meets "The Blair Witch Project" can do anything to liven things up.
The students who spend the night in the old, dark house are Sara (Bianca Kajlich), Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas), Jen (Katee Sackhoff), Bill (Thomas Ian Nicholas), Donna (Daisy McCrackin), and Jim (Luke Kirby). The Internet programmers responsible for setting up the show and placing Web cams in every room are Freddie (Busta Rhymes) and Nora (Tyra Banks). As expected, with a bank of about a dozen television monitors in the control room, no one is watching when the first body drops.
It seems incredible that after all these years, with the passing of so many slasher-movie clones and so many parodies of the genre, another one could be made that follows the timeworn formula so religiously. Depend upon the requisite number of red herrings, false alarms, stuff dropping out of cupboards, decapitations, and the like. There's even a subplot about a pair of teenagers watching the show on their home computer, one of whom figures out that what they're seeing is for real, but he can't get through to 911 emergency. If he had a car to drive to the rescue, it undoubtedly wouldn't have started.
I found "Halloween: Resurrection" so bad, it was unintentionally funny. Maybe it was just me. At any rate, the movie is rated R for brief nudity, blood, gore, violence, and the occasional harsh word. I suppose that's all anyone expects from this sort of film.
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