Halloween: Resurrection

(2002) *

I reviewed this last year, but only because it happened to be on cable at an opportune moment. Watching it this year, in context, I dropped its rating from one and a half stars to the dreaded one. This movie is so bad it made me wonder if they noticed the downward spiral of the Friday the 13th series and tried to catch up in one swift stroke.

First of all, they TOTALLY undermine everything that was cool about H20, just so they could have Jamie Lee Curtis appear in an intro with no bearing whatever on the larger story. I understand that by their very nature, slasher sequels are not kind to the victors of the earlier movies. But this was the cheapest of cheap, and I immediately wanted to pretend it never happened.

Second of all, for some reason this movie is a giant valentine to the coolness of Busta Rhymes, and he's just hateful in this. I don't know much about Busta Rhymes in general, and I'm actually inclined to like him. However, his character is the frontman for Dangertainment, the outfit that runs the Real World: Myers House show whose cast Michael uses as his next pool of victims. That means Busta's the axis point for most of Resurrection's major "ideas," so you're subjected to several self- righteous, sneering speeches directed at whichever character is holding the position of Fool Who Disagrees With Busta. By the end of the movie, each utterance of "muthaFUCKA" made me want to stick my boot through the TV.

Disliking so-called reality TV as I do, I thought it might be fun to see such a show hacked to bits. You know: "and here's the roomate who's really hard to get along with." It soon becomes really clear that such a show would actually be pretty boring-ass shit (since that would be this movie, just without most of the slashings). The characters wander around the dark house, supposedly finding clues to some question nobody really ever asked. I started to choke on the bad logic: the normal-sized house behaves like a vast mansion, the first cast member killed is looking in a mirror when Michael pops out of it, yet NOBODY notices this despite the fact there’s a camera on the victim’s head and supposedly thousands of viewers with rewind buttons.

In the end we get another big speech by Busta about turning OFF the cameras (yes, this contradicts his earlier position) and the surviving cast member grabs the brass ring –- she’s famous! Ugh. This is a five-bushel bucket of suck.