It comes as little surprise that HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION was the last film in the long-running HALLOWEEN series (except for the new Rob Zombie 're-imaginings'). It's a real stinker of a movie, totally devoid of any kind of originality and playing out its storyline with an inane mix of seriousness and goofiness, never really working as a straight film or a spoof. It's heavily indebted to two films: SCREAM, what with the self referencing and the self-aware nature of the hidden cameras, internet webcams etc., and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT, with lots of mock-grainy video camera footage used in an attempt at atmospheric scares.
HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION begins in a totally unacceptable way: by killing Jamie Lee Curtis' character, Laurie Strode. Apparently, Curtis only agreed to appear if she would be killed off, so the scriptwriter decided to have her do something extremely stupid (and anybody who knows her character, especially from the first film, would know that she would never do something this crazy). Once that unpleasantness is out of the way, we're back into the predictable teen slasher mould, with a bunch of teenagers hooked up in the Myers house, having sex and smoking drugs until Myers himself turns up to bump them off. This film tries to update the plot into the internet age, so characters use palm-top computers and communicate online rather in real life, although oddly nobody seems to use a mobile phone much. It's all rather pointless.
The stalk 'n' slash sequences are amusing rather than frightening, and the cheesy gore effects are just that: all effect, all put on, without any impact. There's also one of the dumbest-looking severed head gags I've seen in a movie. The teen cast is pretty awful, with the ladies particularly ill-represented. Bianca Kajlich is an uninteresting heroine, and the rest of the girls are either bimbos or, in the worst case, Tyra Banks. Not that the guys fare much better: the two familiar cast members are American PIE's Thomas Ian Nicholas (he's offed quickly in a gag ripped from HOUSE) and black rapper Busta Rhymes, whose kung fu schtick come the climax is frankly embarrassing. This time around, Myers isn't in the least bit frightening, and he's played by a stuntman who should have stuck to doing stunts rather than trying to act menacing. The only decent thing about this film is the classic HALLOWEEN music, and even that was better in the original.
HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION begins in a totally unacceptable way: by killing Jamie Lee Curtis' character, Laurie Strode. Apparently, Curtis only agreed to appear if she would be killed off, so the scriptwriter decided to have her do something extremely stupid (and anybody who knows her character, especially from the first film, would know that she would never do something this crazy). Once that unpleasantness is out of the way, we're back into the predictable teen slasher mould, with a bunch of teenagers hooked up in the Myers house, having sex and smoking drugs until Myers himself turns up to bump them off. This film tries to update the plot into the internet age, so characters use palm-top computers and communicate online rather in real life, although oddly nobody seems to use a mobile phone much. It's all rather pointless.
The stalk 'n' slash sequences are amusing rather than frightening, and the cheesy gore effects are just that: all effect, all put on, without any impact. There's also one of the dumbest-looking severed head gags I've seen in a movie. The teen cast is pretty awful, with the ladies particularly ill-represented. Bianca Kajlich is an uninteresting heroine, and the rest of the girls are either bimbos or, in the worst case, Tyra Banks. Not that the guys fare much better: the two familiar cast members are American PIE's Thomas Ian Nicholas (he's offed quickly in a gag ripped from HOUSE) and black rapper Busta Rhymes, whose kung fu schtick come the climax is frankly embarrassing. This time around, Myers isn't in the least bit frightening, and he's played by a stuntman who should have stuck to doing stunts rather than trying to act menacing. The only decent thing about this film is the classic HALLOWEEN music, and even that was better in the original.