Halloween: Resurrection

Part of my month-long goal of watching/reviewing nothing but horror movies was to delve a little deeper into the Halloween series.  I love the first film (who doesn't?) and thought the second was not-quite mediocre.  I opted to skip the next four in the series, partly because I preferred seeing the direct sequels to Halloween II and partly because Netflix was streaming Halloween H20 and Halloween: Resurrection, the seventh and eighth in the franchise, respectively.  I watched these two movies back-to-back, and while I found a lot of stupidity in H20, I was still entertained.  Will that trend continue with Resurrection?

It depends.  Is Michael singing along to "Hip-Hop Hooray"?

Three years after the events in H20, we catch up with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis).  The past few years have not been kind to Laurie.  It seems that the person she decapitated at the end of the last film was not, in fact, Michael Myers.  Apparently, Michael managed to find an EMT worker with a similar build, crushed his larynx, swapped clothes (and mask) with the worker, and scampered off into the night, leaving poor innocent EMT guy to get his head chopped off by Laurie.  Aside from going against twenty years of Michael Myers logic --- this is the Timex of slasher villains, the man who won't stop ticking --- and having Michael resort to trickery, like any normal wuss, this also means that Laurie has been committed to a psychiatric institute, which may or may not be for the criminally insane.

Well, she has the "crazy eyes" part down pat

I'm not exactly sure, since Laurie has resorted to faking a comatose state to avoid medication and treatment, but it sure seems like she's there against her will.  Oh, and there's a patient who is celebrating Halloween by wearing a clown mask (a la John Wayne Gacy) and reciting his favorite serial killer statistics.  Side note: Gacy, Dahmer, and Myers all came from the greater Chicago area...do losing sports teams contribute to serial killing?  Anyway, Laurie is faking the degree of her craziness because she knows Michael will come for her someday.  And he does.  This time, he kills her when she stops to do something absolutely, ludicrously stupid.  They could have stretched this into an entire movie (Halloween II, anyone?), but the filmmakers opted to squeeze all that into the first fifteen minutes or so.

Huh.  The last film went to great lengths, completely ignoring the continuity of the previous three films, to bring Michael back to his family-hating roots, and Resurrection has him finally kill his little sister in the beginning of the film.  What the hell is this film going to be about, then?  A reality television-styled webcast, naturally.  Freddie (Busta Rhymes, who seriously got top billing in the movie) and his business partner (Tyra Banks) are filming a webcast, because that is how you make money in the 2000s, right?  Um, sure.  The pair select a group (that happen to mostly know each other) to spend the night in Michael Myers' childhood home in Haddenfield, Illinois.  The idea is for Freddie to dress up like Michael and scare the crap out of the group as they discovered "clues," planted by Freddie, that explained Michael's behavior.  Think Ghost Hunters, but with a prankster involved.  There is only one problem...Michael Myers is actually living in the sewers beneath his old home, and he doesn't like visitors.

Michael, about to kiss a man to death

At this point, I would like to point out that two of Halloween: Resurrection's most famous cast members are African-American.  Why does that matter?  Really, it doesn't.  It just reminded me of Eddie Murphy's classic stand-up:

So, just in case Haunted Mansion hadn't convinced you already, Eddie Murphy is not always right.

The acting in Halloween: Resurrection is fairly shitty, across the board.  When Busta Rhymes is the top-billed actor in the film, you know there is a problem.  It's not that Busta is terrible (although he is), it's just that he's not good enough to headline a major film.  I thought he was alternately ridiculous (like when he laughed like Muttley)...

...and just plain annoying (when he tried to act), but I wasn't expecting a whole lot from him, as an actor or a character.  The main girl, Sara (Bianca Kajlich) was practically void of personality, which is usually enough to survive a slasher flick.  American Pie alum Thomas Ian Nicholas and Save the Last Dance-r Sean Patrick Thomas were similarly underwhelming.  The only supporting cast members that stuck out were Katee Sackhoff (for being a fame whore), Daisy McCrackin (for showing intellectual boobies), and Luke Kirby (for being obnoxious and unrealistic). 

Katee Sackhoff, in her best scene

Jamie Lee Curtis was fine, but her character dies before the opening credits, so that's not much of a help.  Look, I don't normally care how good the acting is in slasher films, but the quality here is such a huge drop from H20 that it distracted me.  Aside from Kajlich's good girl --- who has no motivation to be in this plot --- everyone character was ridiculously one-note.  Everything Sean Patrick Thomas said involved food, Katee Sackhoff spent her entire time trying to act like a wannabe actress, and Kirby and McCrackin jettisoned logic as soon as they entered the Myers house.  As for Busta...well, he occasionally narrates his thoughts aloud.  I would have been fine with stereotypes (they're all going to die, anyhow) but these characters were just obnoxious.

This isn't director Rick Rosenthal's first experience with Michael Myers.  He also directed Halloween II; this time, though, John Carpenter wasn't around to ratchet up the effectiveness of the gore.  While I am willing to blame the awful acting on Rosenthal (somebody had to tell the actors to keep it up), I do get the distinct impression that his directorial intent was overridden a few times in this film.  The first clue comes from the alternate promo poster, which was used for the DVD cover:

Someone took the original poster and photoshopped-in the supporting cast.  That's not a crime, of course, but it was done incompetently.  Aside from the odd and unnatural position of the knife, Jamie Lee Curtis is shown as she appeared in H20, with short hair.  It is also worth noting that the end of the film throws an unexpected twist in; the entire film seems to be building up to having Sara rescued by her internet buddy, but at the last minute somebody else --- who should have died from multiple stab wounds --- comes in and saves the day.  That was unexpected and also makes the internet buddy subplot fairly worthless.  That is because the theatrical ending wasn't the original one; through terrible editing, Monster Crap has still-frame proof that internet buddy was supposed to save the day, but the ending got changed --- they were just too lazy to completely re-shoot the sequence.  So how much of this mess is Rosenthal's doing, and how much was due to the interference of the producers?  It's hard to say, but I think both failed to make this movie entertaining, suspenseful, or horrifying.

Case in point: Michael politely waits for their conversation to end

Halloween: Resurrection is not completely without value.  Tyra Banks was killed off-camera, so audiences were spared her "acting."  There are ten kills and some ridiculously inappropriate nudity.  The actions of the characters are frequently idiotic enough to evoke laughter from any thinking person.  Michael Myers gets electrocuted in the testicles, an area that I don't think anyone has thought to attack before.  Even when you add all that up, there isn't much going for this movie.  When you factor in the fact that Michael isn't being creepy, he is just killing trespassers in his own home, it becomes obvious that Resurrection has lost sight of what makes Michael Myers cool.  He needs to kill for unknown reasons, and he shouldn't ever resort to trickery.  What a mess; no wonder they let Rob Zombie reboot the series after this piece of crap.

The entire time I spent writing this review, I had this song stuck in my head.  Mister Busta Rhymes, tell 'em what I did:

Halloween II (1981)

What does Skelepumpkin have to do with Michael Myers?

The original Halloween is a classic horror film, so it's not surprising that the movie's villain was brought back for another round.  What is surprising is that it took three years for it to happen.  But how to make a sequel that doesn't immediately fall short of the original?  Apparently, the answer is to have the sequel pick up at the instant that the original left off.

Halloween ended with Michael Myers giving the murder of poor Laurie Stroad (Jamie Lee Curtis) the good ol' college try; he never gave up hope, even after a stab wound to the neck, a stab wound in the eye, and a stab wound in the chest.  When Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) shows up and unloads six bullets into him, well...that's a persuasive argument to take a break from the Laurie Stroad project.  After being shot, Michael falls out of a second story window and lands on the ground.  However, when Dr. Loomis looks down, Michael has vanished.  He didn't go very far.  About a block away, Michael heals his wounds the best way he knows how: by stabbing some elderly people with a kitchen knife.  And then he goes after their teenage neighbor, for some reason.  Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis and the police scour the town, looking for Michael.  They eventually find someone matching his costume (really?  Who wears a William Shatner mask painted white with coveralls before Michael Myers was famous?), but he runs for some reason, gets hit by a police car and slammed into a van, which explodes, and he silently burns to death.  That is good enough for the police, but Dr. Loomis needs more proof that Michael is dead.  If only he knew where to find Michael!

Meanwhile, Laurie was taken to the hospital to treat her injuries from the first film.  The hospital has about six people working on Halloween night, which sounds a little short-staffed to me, but I'm not in charge of scheduling shifts at fictitious medical centers.  Laurie spends a good deal of the movie drifting into and out of consciousness, flashing back to her childhood, where she learns that she's adopted and she meets a quiet older boy...somewhere.  Michael figures out where Laurie is, so he hoofs it to the hospital and starts killing his way through the staff.  Will Laurie wake up in time to save herself?  Will Dr. Loomis figure out what Michael will do next?  Why does Michael keep picking on Laurie?  The answers to all these questions and more await you in...Halloween II!

First, the bad news.  Halloween II is nowhere near as good as the original.  The main reason for this is the change of directors; John Carpenter did co-write the script with the original film's other writer, Debra Hill, and he did go back and re-shoot some of the kill scenes to amp up the gore.  Having input into the film is not the same as directing it, though, and his absence is felt.  Rick Rosenthal took over the role of director, and he does his best to follow in the footsteps of Halloween.  This is his first time directing, though, and it shows.  The POV shots are not handled as well and the acting is much worse this time around.

Actually, I take that back.  The acting isn't terrible, it just doesn't use the best assets in the film.  Jamie Lee Curtis is sleeping for most of the movie (so she couldn't utilize her famous scream) and Donald Pleasence spends waaaay too much time bossing the police around.  No, the problem is that the characters got infected with a serious case of stupiditis.  Examples?

• "Damn you for letting him go, doctor!"  Uh, Myers escaped.  And this doctor spent all day trying to convince you that Myers was a danger.
• A nurse can't work a walkie talkie, even with brief instructions.
• An EMT can enter a room with blood covering the floor, but the second he realizes that there's blood on the floor, he slips and knocks himself out.  He's not Wile E. Coyote; he's a guy who should probably have shoes designed not to slip.
• Michael kills a (naked) nurse by scalding her to death.  Kind of lame, but kind of awesome.  But his hand that keeps her face in the water doesn't get scalded.
•  Why doesn't the Haddonfield police have an officer guarding Laurie?  She is the only surviving victim of a killer that is still at large, you know.

There's more than that, but when every character does something dumb, it gets tiresome to list every example.

The music in this film is very different from the first, as well.  The main themes return, but they have been affected by 80s synthesizers and sound tinnier.  And crappier.  Those themes aren't used much, though.  Instead, some generic horror score is provided and "Mr. Sandman" (Yeeeeeessss?  Bring them a dream) by the Chordettes opens and closes the film.  Um.  Okay.  Weird.  I guess Laurie is asleep for most of the movie, but...huh...that's just a bewildering musical choice.

The movie is not all bad, though.  In an attempt to compete with other slasher movies, there are more kills, more gore and more nudity this time around.  The kills are usually pretty cool.  This is the earliest movie I have seen a hypodermic needle to the eye kill someone.  Michael proves to be creative, too, by draining the blood of one victim, scalding another, and just having fun with the rest.  The body count in the first film was five.  I counted fifteen this time.  As a standard slasher film, this is a respectable movie.

As the sequel to an awesome slasher movie, it falls short.  The changes made from movie to movie make sense, for the most part, but I think this film was dumbed down to compete with lower quality films.  I had several small but serious gripes when watching the movie.  First, Myers' mask has more detail; I thought the pure white of the first film's mask was scarier.  Michael takes a ridiculous amount of damage without dying, even if you don't count the first movie; if you do count the first film, he survived eleven gunshot wounds, a knife wound, a needle to the neck, a wire to the eye, a two story fall and then --- after all that --- he gets shot in each eye and keeps fighting.  Seriously, what the hell.  Perhaps my biggest problem with the movie is that they answer why Michael is chasing Laurie.  One of the most frightening things about the first movie was the randomness of his obsession, but if he has a reason then he has a logic that can be understood, and you don't fear (as much) what you understand.  And, in the first movie, Michael primarily killed those that he knew Laurie cared for.  This time, it seems to be some (but not all) of the people he meets.  I just liked it better when I didn't know why or who he would kill.  Now, I feel reasonably assured that I would survive a trip to Haddonfield, Illinois, and "assured" isn't a feeling I like to have after watching horror flicks.