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Synopsis: It's medication time at the asylum, and the celebrity patient is Laurie Strode. Laurie has been in the madhouse for three years, catatonic, in the aftermath of her brother Michael's last rampage. Laurie thought she had killed him once and for all, but Michael outfoxed her and somehow gussied up a cop to take the full measure of Laurie's wrath. Laurie beheaded an innocent man, and ever since, has waited in her room at the asylum for Michael to return for her. Eventually he does, and they battle to the death once and for all. Meanwhile, in Haddonfield, Illinois, a new internet entertainment start up has concocted the idea of sending six college students into Michael Meyer's ancestral home over Halloween night for a web broadcast. Their mission is to shed some light on Michael's homicidal tendencies. Freddie and his girlfriend, Nora, our team of entrepeneurs, has rigged the house with some surprises for their intrepid young investigators, but they haven't reckoned with the fact that Halloween is the night HE came home...

The Scene of the Crime: As a dog returns to its own vomit, so does director Rick Rosenthal return, once again, to the franchise he helped make irrellevant all those years ago. Rosenthal was the man responsible for Halloween II (MORE of the night HE came home) and that film introduced all of the series's dumbest elements--the relationship between Laurie and Michael being prime among them--in an attempt to explain away the first film's sense of mystery. That film also made the grave mistake of taking the violent set pieces of the Friday the 13th films as a model rather than its own predecessor. This time, he has been tasked with explaining how Michael Meyers survives being decapitated at the end of Halloween: H20. The solution is rather less than satisfactory, but still very much in the tradition of monster resurrections since horror sequels began. Even so, the prospect of this franchise continuing far into the future is dismaying. According to the timeline established by the first film, Michael Meyers is now 45 years old. I suspect that he will continue cutting a swath through teen-agers until he is elligible for a walker, or until someone decides that he's a supernatural entity after all and fast-forwards him into the future to join fellow slasher, Jason (DON'T get me started...).

Unforgivable Sins: Sitting through this particular installment was particularly gruelling for me, because the first twenty minutes are so unbelievably wrong headed that the rest of the film is endured with the pall of anger simmering just under the experience. A longtime audience is going to have an emotional investment in Laurie Strode, and watching the film allow Michael to finally consumate their relationship with a knife in the back is one of the single most distasteful experiences in recent cinema. One can only imagine why Jamie Lee Curtis agreed to do this film after finally exorcising her Halloween demon in the last installment. I presume that her presence in the film is pure contract fulfillment and that her fate is a means of escaping future installments. I further theorize that the absence of Laurie's son in the film reflects the fact that the producers can no longer afford Josh Hartnett's salary. Whatever the motives behind the first twenty minutes, they are likely to make any fan of the series righteously pissed off. I certainly fall into that category, myself. But the film was by no means finished staging sequences that pissed me off.

The Rules for Slasher Films (Ammended): It's painfully easy to spot Final Girl the instant she walks on screen. I know that in films like this, it's ALWAYS easy to spot her, but in this case they could have hung a sign on her. The remaining five college students all commit Slasher Movie Sins that are punishable by death (they have sex, smoke pot, etc.). There is, however, the case of Busta Rhymes as Freddie, who represents the new Slasher Film paradigm. In the tradition of L.L. Cool J in both Deep Blue Sea and Halloween: H20, it seems that rap stars are ALSO invulnerable to wounds that would KILL other characters. Freddie takes a knife in the chest, but is STILL around at the end of the movie to go toe to toe with Michael. Freddie even ups the ante for this role, because, let's face it, he's a sleazeball. If a SLEAZEBALL can't get killed in the perverse universe of the slasher movie while relatively normal young people are dropping like flies, it's time to retire the form entirerly. Of course, one could profitably argue that it was time to retire the entire subgenre in 1979, but what the hell...

Influences: Once again, we are presented with a Halloween movie that takes its inspiration NOT from Halloween, but from something else. In this case, the inspiration is taken from The Blair Witch Project, which provides the present movie with its premise: the POV investigation of Micheal Meyers's house. This doesn't work at all, largely because the source of the inspiration is an unrepeatable experiment and because the actual footage is OBVIOUSLY not composed at random by the actors. As metacinema, this is particularly dimwitted, a fault compounded by the film's OTHER point of referrence: Michael Powell's Peeping Tom. By explicitly ripping off these movies--WITHOUT any kind of reinterpretation or ironic commentary--Halloween: Resurrection reveals its own dearth of ideas.

The Eyes Have It: One side effect of the mainstreaming of the Slasher Movie is the fact that the performances are generally better in the current batch of films than they were in the first wave, twenty years ago. These films employ professionals, even in the marginal roles of victims, and there is seldom any dialogue as groan-inducing as the "...you mean...Camp BLOOD?" line in Friday the 13th, for instance. The performance of stuntman Brad Loree as Michael Meyers, however, is a tremendous step down. There is an indefinable difference between the sheer presence of Michael as portrayed by Nick Castle in the original and in the presence, or lack thereof, in the subsequent films. Castle had the movement of the character down pat, including that unforgettable tilt of the head after he pinned one of his victims to the door. The actors who have stepped into the role afterwards have been unable to match this, all the while trying to consciously imitate it. Part of the problem in the new film is the mask, which doesn't really match the glowing mask in the first film, but more troublesome is the fact that the audience can see Michael's eyes too often. In the first film, Michael's eyes were largely hidden, making his face a cipher and giving it something of the aspect of a shark, with its black, soulless eyes. The repeated shots of Michael's eyes in the new film serve only to de-mythologize him and make him mundane.

Marketing Blunders: This film was in the can last year and was originally slated to be released in September of 2001. Miramax shelved it in order to film some new scenes. They appended the trailer to Jason X, which seems like a logical move, but that film sucked so bad that I doubt it did Halloween: Resurrection any favors. And finally, they released the film on July 12th. Miramax is renowned for their marketing department, which has arguably won the company many of its Oscars, and yet, there is something profoundly wrong with the marketing of THIS film in particular.

Can anyone spot it?

What kind of moron makes a Halloween film and then releases it in July instead of the last week of October?

This film is a botched job all around...