Halloween Resurrection is an affront to its memory, an abomination of a
movie that, if it weren't for
Rollerball,
would be the worst film of 2002.
The supposed hook for dragging us back for an eighth time is that it's been
given a dotcom spin by having some students spend Halloween night in the
old Myers place for reasons of the utmost vagueness. Their every move is
being broadcast on the internet by means of
Aliens-style
headcams and webcams placed around the house (any similarity to My Little Eye
isn't really worth mentioning since that was rubbish too). What they don't
realise is that Michael is home and he doesn't really like having visitors.
Meanwhile, a bunch of kids at a party watch the webacst, initially unaware
of the danger the housemates are in. One of them, known as Deckard, has an
email link to one of these hand-held workpad thingies that the one we know
will survive is carrying, which he uses to warn her of imminent danger.
Treats here include the caution "Don't scream", and the
presentation-is-everything change of font to tell her to get out of the
house. Glorious. Another gem is when, on opening the kitchen cupboards,
they find some herbs that are still remarkably fresh after supposedly 40
years, indicating that Michael likes to unwind after a hard day's
slaughtering by rustling up a nice lamb dish.
The cast of mostly unknowns play the usual band of stock characters and
they're all fairly useless. There was one ungodly moment early on when I
thought we were going to have to endure a Matthew Lillard tribute act, but
thankfully the guy only had one short scene. At least Curtis had the good
sense to bail out early, at the end of an occasionally decent prologue
which sees Laurie in the nuthouse waiting for Michael to come back for her
and finally finish her off. The high point of this is the hilarious
explanation of how Michael came to survive having his shoulders relieved of
his head at the end of H20.
What it boils down to is that when a witless script is given to a director
with no talent, it becomes very difficult to make a man in a boiler suit
and a Captain Kirk mask frightening. The irony is, William Shatner himself
would have been far scarier.
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
