The Halloween Films Ranked: #11 ‘Halloween: Resurrection’ (2002)

#11 in my ranking of the Halloween franchise.

Halloween fully becomes Friday the 13^th, complete with idiotic, sex-craved teenagers doing stupid things while staying in a place they could easily escape from. Le sigh. It’s not the worst this franchise has gotten, the dumb lore of The Curse of Michael Myers has to be the low point, but this isn’t good. This is Moustapha Akkad discarding, again, the potential of tension in favor of tired slasher cliches, all while getting the director of II, Rick Rosenthal, to just embrace the direction fully without any sense of wit or fun.

In a pointless prologue, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is in a mental hospital that gets invaded by Michael Myers where he finally accomplishes his goal of murdering his sister. For all that this has to do with the rest of the film, it’s way overlong, not to mention that it’s marked by really stupid characters while Myers fully embraces being magical and able to appear anywhere at anytime again.

With that out of the way, we’re introduced to our actual characters led by Sara (Bianca Kajlich), a college student at Haddonfield College who, with her two friends Jen (Katee Sackhoff) and Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas), get selected to take part in Deathentertainment’s exploration of Myers’ house on live-Internet feed by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes). Sara also has an Internet friend, Myles (Ryan Merriman), whom she’s never met, but he’s fallen in love with her.

So, the setup is that we’re going to get six teenagers into the house for more than half the film as they steadily get picked off by Michael while everyone figures out reasons to just stick around instead of leaving.

Despite the fact that the basic premise is kind of stupid, the execution is mostly just kind of boring, and the characters are generally thin and unlikeable, there are actually some interesting little pieces here and there. There’s an all but explicit reference to Peeping Tom when Myers uses a tripod to kill someone. There’s this balance between the kids finding easy answers to Michael’s past and all of it being nonsense within the film and there being no answer. I mean…that’s sort of interesting. It could have been the focus of the film.

Instead, we get teenagers, in effectively a haunted house, tearing off each other’s clothes in a dank, dirty basement, while they know they’re being filmed, and trying to bone. This is pure, dumb, Friday the 13^th territory, and a serious departure from the re-embrace of tension based on character that Halloween H20 had sort of managed decently well enough.

Also, he whole thing about Myles getting everyone at a part obsessed with the show and then using some internet messaging to guide Sara through the house when things get dire is just silly. It’s this late-90s skin to just using a phone that feels awkward and dumb as it plays out.

The kills are…fine, I guess. They don’t inspire great visceral reactions like the detailed deaths in H20, but they’re decent enough. They’re just happening to people the film has made no effort to care about. They’re really just meat for the knife. The lamest is probably the girl just getting put on a spike in an underground hallway. The best is probably the beheading. It’s…fine. Doesn’t have much impact, but it’s sort of fun.

So, it’s dumb. It tries to enter over-the-top territory in its finale with everything on fire and someone dead coming back to say a one-liner, but it’s kind of a dumb one-liner and I hadn’t care about anything since I first saw Laurie in that mental hospital. It’s mostly just drudgery as we watch an unrealistic and kind of stupid series of events driven by stupid characters who should be doing anything that they’re doing. However, there are a couple of interesting touches along the way. It’s not a miserable as some of the others in this franchise, but it’s not anywhere close to good.

Originally published here