Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

“I’ll see you in hell” – Laurie Strode

(As I was settling down to start the write-up on this one, it struck me that this movie is now twenty years old. As much time has elapsed since the release of this movie as had between John Carpenter’s Halloween and H20, and that seemed so long. I must be getting old, I guess.)

Anyhow, four years after the events of Halloween: H20, the decision was taken that the world needed to hear from Michael Myers again, but he’d been killed. Decisively. Once and for all. The Myers head had been separated from the Myers shoulders by an axe wielding Laurie Strode. We last left her waiting as the police sirens were approaching. Surely, with Myers’s number of kills and his repeated attempts on Laurie’s life, no court in America could reasonably convict her – right? Happy ending.

The Halloween movies are famous for their lack of happy endings, as we’ve seen.

But Michael had been decapitated! (One of the reasons I played the trilogy of Halloween 1, 2 & H20 as a very satisfying trilogy for years) How the hell…?

Well, there had been a tragic mistake that robbed Laurie of the happy ending she, above all other scream queens, deserved. The first paramedic to reach Myers discovered that Myers doesn’t die easy. He revived and crushed the paramedic’s larynx rendering him unable to speak. Myers then changed clothes with him.

So, get this – none of the policemen or paramedics bothered checking under the mask. And somehow, nobody noticed the hideously disfigured paramedic stalking around with a kitchen knife in his hand. So, when Laurie decided to take some extra insurance and abduct the body in the ambulance – she took the wrong person. (Still doesn’t explain why she was attacked, or how the masked body survived everything she threw at it, up to the point of decapitation.) But essentially, she killed the wrong guy and Myers wandered away free. Overcome with guilt and grief, she has spent the intervening years in a psychiatric institute. She seems catatonic, but she’s alert – ready for the inevitable day when her brother will come visiting. Which he does.

We don’t know how he finds her this time, but he does – but this time, he comes crashing through doors like he’s Jason Voorhees. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) lures him to the roof, where she’s prepared a snare-like trap (despite being locked in a padded cell and seeming catatonic and unresponsive to the hospital staff) and as he’s hanging by his ankle, he manages to stab her and throw her over the side of the building to her death.

And that’s it. The end of Laurie Strode. In the first ten minutes or so. We then go straight to the bulk of the film with not a moment to reflect that this chase has been going on for 24 years. The Laurie Strode character deserved better.

But as soon as that part of the film is over, and it’s essentially a prologue of sorts to tie up loose ends, I guess, we’re in Haddonfield where an internet reality show is planning a live Halloween stream, as they send a crowd of college kids to spend the night locked in the old Myers house. I applaud the decision to take the Halloween movies in a new and different direction, and I think the live stream reality show is a great angle, but it loses momentum very quickly. Although it resembles the original Myers house in a few fleeting shots, the interior of the place is unfeasibly vast with seemingly several ways in and out of every room. Of course, there’s very little light – but all the show participants wear bodycams that compensate for the lack of light.

There are some well executed scenes where Myers suddenly just melts into view from the shadows, and others where he crosses the lens of a camera at the exact moment when a technician is looking away from the monitor - but to be honest, you can only pull that off so many times. It becomes pretty tedious and the sheer scale of the house is beyond the realms of credibility. Remember how big the house is the old Tom and Jerry cartoons was? Those rooms that seemed to spread for acres? It's like that. No way could a half dozen camera wearing people and a psychotic killer avoid each other in the same rooms that many times.

But it gets worse – the producers have planted some prop body parts behind a fake wall to make for a better show, but behind that was is an opening to a tunnel where Myers evidently spent the time between Halloween 2 and H20. The house literally has not a cellar, but a vast catacomb beneath it that nobody knew about, as well as a virtual vault where Myers was kept as a kid.

All in all, these new flourishes result in the brutal force of nature aspect of Myers being diminished.

Okay, so in the final reel, the surviving cast members have a showdown with him, the place goes on fire and they unwisely leave Myers to his fiery fate in the inferno. (Nobody seems to remember he already survived an inferno pretty well.) His body is carted off on a gurney to the local morgue, where a curious attendant unzips the body bag to take a peek – and his eyes open.

All in all, this film looks great on paper, but sadly lacks in realisation. Far better, in my opinion to just watch the first two and H20, which gives a good resolution to the story. This needlessly muddies everything up and the death of a beloved heroine has no consequence. Halloween: Resurrection is the last film in this second stab (see what I did there?) at a continuity and has no resolution at all. There was going to be another sequel, and my guess is that it would’ve been dreary – but it was not to be.

A certain rock star turned director had an idea…