You can always tell when a once popular movie franchise has reached rock bottom – it’s the moment when the current custodians decide to jump on whatever pop culture bandwagon happens to be passing by in a usually vain attempt to garner more publicity than the latest instalment actually deserves. So when the Halloween series, impressively revived in Halloween H2O (1998), opted to buy into the early 2000s craze for vacuous reality TV shows, it firmly signalled the death of whatever dignity or credibility the series still had.

The first ten minutes are by far and away the best, closing the door on the events of Halloween (1978), Halloween 2 (1981) and Halloween H20 with a fitting send off – temporary as it turned out – for Jaime Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode. The explanation of how Michael Myers survived the climactic events of H2O is unconvincing, but it sets up a well staged final showdown between the tragic, tormented Laurie and her demonic younger brother. Curtis is excellent in her all-too-brief cameo, finishing her time in the series as a much wiser, harder and more resourceful Laurie, no longer afraid of Michael though ultimately powerless to stop him.

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Really, this opening sequence – which sees director Rick Rosenthal back in the same hospital milieu as his previous entry in the series, Halloween 2 – should have ended the series; not only would it have spared us the nonsense still to come, but given that Michael’s over-riding desire was to kill his sister, one would have to question why his bloodlust hasn’t been slated now she’s dead.

But this impressive prologue – which might have been better served as an epilogue to the altogether better H2O – serves only as a curtain raiser to the main story, a pointless trip back to Haddonfield almost a quarter of a century after Michael first came home where reality TV entrepreneur Busta Rhymes (that other cliche of late 20th/early 21st century horror guaranteed to bring a sinking feeling to many a genre fan, the rap star in a leading role 1) is setting up his latest project.

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From this point on, Halloween Resurrection becomes a strictly by-the-numbers slasher – the young cast are all virtually indistinguishable from each other and their only notable characteristics are just how appallingly stupid and offensively obnoxious they can be, even more so than is usual for a slasher cast; the shocks are the usual mechanical jolts underscored by deafening synthesiser blasts from composer Danny Lux; and the pitiful attempts at intellectual depth are out of place and trite (having a student recognise Jung’s “shadow” during a lecture doesn’t give the film the psychological depth and academic credentials its creators clearly thinks it does and as for the other psycho-babble about Michael Myers being “the great white shark of our unconscious”… It’s simply laughable).

The only departure from the slasher norm is Rosenthal’s enthusiastic embracing of the techniques employed by the reality TV genre, which may have worked had Rosenthal been able to make his mind up how he was going to present the film – he constantly jumps back and forth between straight narrative, The Blair Witch Project (1999) style shakycam footage, Big Brother inspired voyeurism and even, briefly, the split screen technique seen in Mike Figgis’ Timecode (2000). Sticking to any one of these techniques would have been enough, but Rosenthal constantly jumps backwards and forwards to little effect.

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Tired, dull and predictable, Halloween Resurrection really is scrapping the bottom of the barrel and it was now long past time to let Michael hang up his knife and enjoy a well deserved retirement. The ‘surprise’ ending (yeah, like we didn’t see that one coming…) suggested that at least one more outing was being allowed for, though in the event a direct sequel never materialised. Instead the already convoluted Halloween in-series continuity was thrown to the wind with Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of the original film, his ill-advised sequel, Halloween II (2009) and a new trilogy that ignored everything from Halloween 2 onward and resurrected not only Michael but Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie – Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2020) and Halloween Ends (2021).

  1. See also Queen Latifah in The Bone Collector (1999) and Scary Movie 3 (2003), LL Cool J in Halloween H2O and Deep Blue Sea (1999), Aaliyah in Queen of the Damned (2002), Snoop Dogg in Bones (2001) among many others. ↩