Rick Rosenthal’s “Halloween: Resurrection” (2002) has no opening credit that harken again to the jack-o-lantern themed introductions of the prior movies.
We simply get orange letters however no correct opening, a sign from the get-go that one thing is off.
An introduction with two chatty hospital nurses douses the viewer in exposition and shortly erases the most effective shocks of the earlier “Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later” (1998), which definitively concluded the whole collection.
Not so, explains a nurse, who hits us with “Oh my God, she killed the incorrect man!”
It seems Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode didn’t truly terminate Michael Myers. Extra of this last-scene-of-“Scooby-Doo”-like dialog insists that Strode killed the incorrect man in a Myers-planted swithcheroo, as a result of the incorrect man’s “larynx had been crushed.”
Okay, however then why did the man act like Myers? If it was the incorrect man, then the unintended sufferer was awfully convincing doing every little thing you by no means wish to do with the intention to cease somebody from killing you.
In different phrases, what a croc.
The nurses merely ought to have stated, “Michael Myers continues to be alive…as a result of ‘Halloween H20’ made $55 million.” No additional rationalization wanted.
We additionally study that Strode is on this very hospital, which additionally homes a chatty inmate who’s fast with lists of actual serial killers. Thank goodness for all these talkative, exposition-filled aspect characters!
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Strode’s POV of selecting up a knife is a pleasant nod to the opening of the unique movie. Curtis’ participation was what made me see this opening weekend in theaters (with a rowdy viewers that was all-too-happy to yell out their favourite traces from “Scary Film” throughout sure moments).
The massive confrontation between Strode and Myers is oddly front-loaded, the highest of the primary act, pre-credit stinger, like how a James Bond film opens. It’s the movie’s greatest scene, although “greatest” is a phrase I’d use loosely, since what transpires is difficult to get labored up over.
It appears Strode set a entice for Myers and the system in query wouldn’t be misplaced in a “Dwelling Alone” sequel.” I gained’t give away what occurs, but it surely’s not nice.
Additionally, Strode kisses Myers earlier than she falls out of body (and the film) why?! Myers then offers the deranged inmate his knife like a present at a household gathering (one other massive Why Did That Simply Occur?).
After the prologue, which was sufficient to lure me and a lot of the followers who thought that they had stated goodbye to this franchise again in ’98, “Halloween: Resurrection” turns into a brand new film.
We’re now in a peppy, very-MTV Whole Request Reside feeling film, by which a bunch of younger individuals are being recruited to participate in a brand new Actuality TV concoction deemed “Dangertainment.”
The gist is that the group of younger adults (which incorporates Katee Sackhoff in her second movie function, Thomas Ian Nicholas of “American Pie” and Sean Patrick Thomas of “Save the Final Dance”) need to survive an evening in Myers’ house, which has been outfitted with dozens of cameras that can document the dwell occasion.
The entrepreneurs overseeing the particular (Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks) are unaware that Myers is at giant and actually sad about digital camera being put in childhood bed room.
From the introductory moments, the idea doesn’t work: Myers isn’t scary to observe over surveillance footage.
Halloween: Resurrection “Homecoming” Workprint – What’s Completely different? https://t.co/6u2pKgRrpB by way of @YouTube
from @HacktheMovies
— Charles (@repub9989) October 13, 2022
“Dangertainment” got here earlier than the age of laptops, cameras on telephones and YouTube. Somebody says “We’re gonna be larger than the Osbornes,” a sign of how previous that is.
Humorous, how a film from 2002 can really feel a lot older and much more dated than the 1978 unique.
Though this film was barely forward of the “Ghost Hunters” craze, even “The Blair Witch Challenge” (1999) seemed a lot better than this. Dangertainment is extra like anti-tainment. The scenes of this operation are mind-numbingly unhealthy, because the footage is ugly and the children and producers are obnoxious.
There’s the C-plot, set at a Halloween get together, with two dorks dressed just like the leads of “Pulp Fiction” (guess Rosenthal needed to make his producers pleased). There’s additionally an web consumer who watches the Dangertainment broadcast and goes by the username of “Deckard.”
A lot of hip references however not a single scene, line or character to match something in Wes Craven’s “Scream” (which, at this level, was a trilogy).
The dialogue is wretched, the screenplay is flush with unhealthy selections and the leap scares include soundtrack blasts. The extra critically the film takes itself, the sillier it will get.
There’s additionally low-cost and nonsensical flashes of Myers on the Dangertainment feed, which is finally as pointless and insistent because the “esrever” gimmick on the “Blair Witch 2: Guide of Shadows” DVD.
Talking of unwise selections, the film retains slicing backwards and forwards between the Dangertainment shenanigans and the Halloween get together watching the dwell feed, with teenagers laughing and stating, “That is so pretend!”
As this and “Shaft” (2000) proved, Busta Rhymes is a proficient performer however not an actor. In the meantime, Banks dances whereas she makes cocoa with whipped cream. In any other case, what’s she doing on this?
Rhymes and Banks hold lacking the murders which can be going down, which is both a suggestion of how silly their characters are or additional proof that the dimly lit, blurry Dangertainment feed is unwatchable.
“Halloween: Resurrection” was filmed as “Halloween: The Homecoming” and famously went by means of a reshoot and recutting interval that mirrors many style movies that fell sufferer to Dimension Movies releases.
Rosenthal made the 1981 “Halloween II,” which labored and, sadly, acquired roped again to make this one, which doesn’t.
Even at present, “Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later” stays the very best “Halloween” sequel, whereas this one is on the reverse aspect of that spectrum. No, even “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers” (1995) is healthier, formidable and made attention-grabbing selections, particularly if you happen to can see its fuller, quieter and nuttier “Producer’s Lower.”
The scene with two Michael Myers coming into a room sums up the whole movie: it’s initially intriguing, till it turns into embarrassing.
The movie’s final legacy isn’t the misuse of Curtis on the starter however the spectacle of Rhymes doing impromptu fake kung fu strikes on Myers and uttering the immortal “Trick or deal with, mom—–r.”
If “Halloween” mirrored Alfred Hitchcock, then that is Alfred E. Newman.
