Director: Rick Rosenthal
Cast: Busta Rhymes, Bianca Kajlich, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Katee Sackhoff
Have I Seen it Before: It was, indeed released on my 18th birthday. After a screening that weekend of Road to Perdition (2002) that ended more depressingly than could be exclusively blamed on the film itself, some pals and I went to go see this to try and save the weekend from itself.
And damned if I didn’t have a great time with it.
Did I Like It: This is not to say that I’m going to take the borderline psychotic view that Halloween: Resurrection is a better film than Sam Mendes’ crime epic, just that I would make the point that taking in a movie at a certain time in one’s life can create wildly—sometimes laughably—subjective opinions.
A lot of time has passed since that screening 19 years ago, and the movie has since descended into a lot of noise. The first reel of the film serves only to discount Halloween H20 (1998), and is interesting only in the sense that it looks like Jamie Lee Curtis is being held against her will. The rest of the film is a mishmash of half-formed ideas, moments filled with anti-tension, and choices (Kung Fu, anyone?) that to recommend the film would be an act of sadism.
The film no longer engages or entertains, it only distracts. My big takeaway all these years later is that people in Haddonfield don’t know how to count. Myers (Brad Loree) is often referred to as variations of America’s worst mass murderer, but it also—discounting the continuity of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)—notes that, combined total, Michael Myers has killed about a dozen people over the course of 20 years. In an era of mass shootings, and only a year after 9/11, that comes across as a slightly ridiculous statement in a film that is already filled to the brim with them. Hell, when we throw John Wayne Gacy into the mix, Myers is not even the Illinois state champ.
And yet, the movie—try as it might—is not without some positive developments. For one thing, Myers’ mask looks pretty okay, that already has the film mastering one element that other sequels perpetually whiffed.
To move beyond the superficial, the film does largely try to jettison the mythology of familicide that has weighed down even the more watchable of the previous sequels, but never gains anywhere near the needed velocity to break orbit from the past. To go further, it turns a dim eye toward previous attempts to explain the evil that lives within Myers. Both impulses were reckoned with far more effectively in the eventual Halloween (2018), and so these attempts to be new and interesting only serve to illuminate how severely off the mark the series has travelled from the John Carpenter original…
Then again, I still have my rewatch of the Rob Zombie films to look forward to. So, things could always be worse.