Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

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Overall rating: 1/5
Director: Rick Rosenthal
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Busta Rhymes, Bianca Kajlich, Sean Patrick Thomas, Tyra Banks

Tagline: Michael Myers is back! And he’s *yawn* killing people or something. I’m pretty sure there was a knife…

Film: Oh Lord, where to start? Watching this movie is the visual equivalent of having your television stand up, grab you by the shoulders and knee you in the balls. Halloween Resurrection is so bad, it’s a waste of Tyra Banks’ acting talents. Think about that, won’t you?

The movie starts out with John Carpenter’s original Halloween theme music—which is still scary—and quickly goes downhill from there. Jamie Lee Curtis fulfilled her contractual obligation to appear in the film by getting killed as quickly as possible—proving that she’s the smart one in the cast. Her death closes the ugly chapter in the Halloween franchise where Michael Myers had some sort of interesting motive. Now we can proceed with random murder and gore.

The movie switches gears after Jamie Lee’s death, and we are quickly introduced to the actors that will provide the bloody grist for the Michael Myers mill. They’re been assembled by hot-shot Internet/television producer Busta Rhymes to explore Michael Myers boyhood home on Halloween night.

There’s a cook, the narcissistic nympho, the weird art student and the heroine. I think there were a few others, as well, but they didn’t make much of an impression. The movie utilizes the technique of characterization by having the cook say stupid things like, “I bet this place has a really big kitchen,” The nympho constantly primps in mirrors and the heroine “has a bad feeling” about this. She probably read the script.

The characters may have had names, but who cares, really? They are here to be stupid and get stabbed, and they fill their roles nicely. They split up to explore the house, investigate strange sounds and fail to hear the blood-curdling screams of their fellow victims. For all the death and mayhem, the movie failed to scare me at all.

Busta Rhymes, who is supposed to be a hot-shot television producer, can’t produce a coherent English sentence in the entire film. Evidently the director just told him to “be Busta.” He appears to be suffering from a variation of the Smurfs’ disease. Except instead of replacing every other word with “smurf,” he replaces it with “muthafucka”. This leads to the classic line “Trick or treat, muthafucka!” It doesn’t help that he is given the dramatic “sum it all up” speech at the end of the movie.

I could go on and on about how this movie sucks, but picking on Halloween: Resurrection is like beating up the handicapped: it’s easy, but still not much fun. The acting is uniformly atrocious. The plot makes little sense, and the film looks like it was edited with a Cuisinart. If you want a scary movie, try the original Halloween. This one isn’t even worth making fun of.

Rating: 1/5

DVD: Widescreen anamorphic format.

Commentary: director Rick Rosenthal and editor Robert A. Ferretti

Extras: Deleted and alternate scenes with director’s commentary – This is the best feature in the movie: deleted scenes! I only wish they had deleted more scenes. In fact, they could delete the whole movie and I’d be happy. They also showed a series of alternate endings, ranging from the boringly predictable to the completely nonsensical. They chose nonsensical for the final cut.
Web cam special with commentary, Photo gallery, On the set with Jamie Lee Curtis, Head cam featurette, Storyboard comparisons

Rating: 2/5

Five Degrees of Separation

Halloween – Watch this one and never go near any movie with “Halloween” in the title again.

Sick: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist – If you’re into watching movies like Halloween: Resurrection, there’s a good chance you will be intrigued by the life a fellow human who enjoys inflicting pain on himself.

A Fish Called Wanda – Probably the best Jamie Lee Curtis movie to date.

So I Married an Axe Murderer – Another serial killer movie with Mike Myers in it. Except this Mike Myers is the good guy.

The Rugrats Movie – If a better Busta Rhymes performance exists, I have yet to find it.