You see, this is what annoys me - wheeling out a once great movie monster in another cynical attempt to extort money from an undemanding cinema going public. Whereas the likes of the Friday the 13th series was already a rip off of Halloween to begin with, and therefore its sequels were just more of the same old rubbish (although I do have a soft spot for Jason X - fun you see, fun) we had the right to expect a little more from the Halloween films, since John Carpenter's masterful original still stands as one of the finest horror films ever made. There is more menace in any one frame of it than there has been in the entirety of its seven increasingly desperate sequels (save the blip that was the watchable H20).

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.

Review copyright © Paul Greenwood, 2002.

DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.

PC games reviewed by the editor are on: