Halloween: Resurrection Reviews

HALLOWEEN meets MTV's Fear in this eighth sequel to John Carpenter's groundbreaking slasher picture. Like HALLOWEEN H20 (1998), it ignores all the post-HALLOWEEN II sequels and hews to a chronology in which unstoppable killer Michael Myers (Brad Loree) vanished following his 1978 rampage, reappearing 20 years later to further torment his traumatized sister, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Here, six college students are recruited for a live, online reality show called "Dangertainment." Outfitted with mini-camera packs, they'll spend Halloween night in the old Myers house in Haddonfield, Ill., poking around dusty corners and looking for clues about Michael Myers' dark past. What they don't realize is that opportunistic producer Freddie Harris (Busta Rimes) and his assistant (Tyra Banks) have rigged the place into a haunted funhouse guaranteed to prompt the panicky reactions that keep viewers interested. Five of the group think the whole experience will be a lark. Jen (Katie Sackhoff) and Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas) hope the exposure will jump-start their careers, skeptics Donna (Daisy McCrackin) and Jim (Luke Kirby) figure it will give them something to sneer at and horn-dog Bill (Thomas Ian Nicholas) is just on the make. Only thoughtful psych student Sara (Bianca Kajlich), the archetypal "final girl," is at all rattled by the house's bloody history, and it's giving nothing away to reveal that history is about to repeat itself. The film does its best to tie up loose ends — it opens with a prologue that severs forever the bloody tie between Michael and Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis, again gamely reprising the role that made her famous) — and put a fresh spin on familiar material without straying too far from the fan-tested formula. Frankly, the script, by genre veteran Larry Brand and newcomer Sean Hood, is smarter than the direction. Yes, the reality-show conceit strongly resembles an obscure, direct-to-video picture called THE ST. FRANCISVILLE EXPERIMENT (2000), itself one of a rash of BLAIR WITCH PROJECT (1999) rip-offs, but it's a savvy way to get the victims-to-be into the Myers house and keep them there once spooky stuff starts happening. But director Rick Rosenthal (HALLOWEEN II) seems to have forgotten everything he ever knew about generating suspense, relying on cliched shadows and grainy, handheld images supposedly shot by the increasingly terrified students. Periodic homages to other films, from the original HALLOWEEN to PEEPING TOM (1960), don't really compensate for his impoverished visual vocabulary.