Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on July 16, 2002, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Ah, the ironies of sequel titles. The eighth in the Halloween cycle was originally subtitled Homecoming, presumably until someone realized that Michael Myers has come home in all of these movies. The new moniker, Resurrection, represents a bit of wishful thinking; the movie may have paid off with a decent opening box-office weekend, but otherwise demonstrates that this is a thoroughly exhausted franchise, one that no up-to-date gimmick can resuscitate.
The film opens with a heartless, insulting prologue, featuring Jamie Lee Curtis in what feels like a contractual obligation, which explains Michael Myers’ decapitation at the end of Halloween: H20 exactly the way you expect it to. The inanities begin here, as a man trips over a corpse that by all rights he should have noticed, as it is lying in the middle of the floor in a room he’s just spent a couple of minutes in. We then move on to a group of college students who are recruited to take part in a webcam broadcast, which involves them spending a night in the long-abandoned Myers house. Overseeing the project are Freddie (Busta Rhymes, acting mostly with his teeth) and his assistant Nora (Tyra Banks); the latter is supposed to be monitoring the action on a bank of computer screens, but somehow manages to miss the real-life mayhem once Michael arrives to decimate the intruders.
The inanities continue: Though the students split up to explore the not-especially-large house, they manage not to run into Michael as he stalks the hallways. Jen (Katee Sackhoff, whose name is misspelled in the opening credits) screams in an upstairs room, and everyone comes running; five minutes later, someone else dies a violent shrieking death, and nobody seems to notice. A character enters through an open back door, and talks about it later, but doesn’t think to use it to escape when things become dangerous. The Myers house is established as being in a bustling suburban area, but none of the neighbors apparently see or hear any of the mayhem, nor do the students think to try to alert them.
And so on. Director Rick Rosenthal and writers Sean Hood and Larry Brand offer a couple of amusing homages (the Laurie-in-the-closet scene from the original Halloween, the character slipping on blood from the second film), but mostly it’s just labored and routine, with Rosenthal’s work completely lacking the panache he brought to Halloween II. At one point, a techie placing cameras for Freddie states, “High angles are scary. Low angles are scary. Medium shots are boring”; one then has to wonder why Rosenthal uses the latter most of the time. He might also have kept another truism in mind: Erratic, jerky vidcam point-of-view shots that render the action incoherent are annoying.
One subplot that promises to bear interesting fruit involves an online relationship that heroine Sarah (Bianca Kajlich) has with a college guy she’s never met. At first, this serves mostly as a distraction from the main action as he communicates with Sarah over a Palm Pilot she brings into the house with her. But the filmmakers seem to be onto something as he watches her increasingly threatening situation with a bunch of other kids at a party, and sends her helpful messages as the rest of the group shouts advice. For a few moments, it’s a fun, reflexive satire of audience involvement in slasher films; too bad the advice Sarah apparently follows, once she has made it to the roof and could easily jump to safety, is to slip right back into the house that both she and the onlookers know is inescapable.
Reviewing Halloween: Resurrection at this point (unsurprisingly, there were no critics’ screenings, though apparently enough quote whores saw it in advance to get their effusions splattered on the opening-day ads) is probably an exercise in futility. Die-hard series fans will likely have seen it already, and few others will care. But sitting in the theater, listening to John Carpenter’s original Halloween theme play over the end credits 23 years after his original first set me on the road to horror fandom, left me feeling a little depressed that it has come to this. Back then, I never would have expected that a horror story that began with “I knew that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply evil” would eventually be reduced to “Trick or treat, muthafucka!”
There’s one other reason Halloween: Resurrection dismayed me, and it’s a frame of reference few other viewers will have. The movie’s web-broadcast device and some of the attendant visual stylings are also used to much better effect in My Little Eye, a gut-clenchingly intense horror film (see review here) that was shot over a year ago, but is currently in distribution limbo. It’ll be a true shame if, when that movie eventually comes out, it is seen as a ripoff of this one.
