Halloween: Resurrection

It all started so well. John Carpenter’s fantastically Hitchcockian horror Halloween (1978) is still the standard by which all psycho-slasher-teen flicks must be measured. Eleven Halloween movies later though, and the knife wielding maniac Michael Myers may not be dead, but he’s looking pretty damn old.

Officially, this sequel to the Kevin Williamson-penned Halloween H20 (conveniently ignoring all of the franchise’s bargain basement 1980s sequels) has the gloriously gravel-voiced Busta Rhymes as an internet impressario who picks a group of teens to spend Halloween night in Michael Myers’ childhood home for a live web broadcast. Cue Myer’s crushingly inevitable appearance and multiple sticky endings.

Naturally, all the stock character types are present and correct from the pretty, dark-clad brooding teen (Kajlich) to the token black friend (a wasted Patrick Thomas) and even the annoying ditzy blonde who’s (thankfully) a cert to get dispatched early in the proceedings.

This is the second haunted-house flick in the last month, but where My Little Eye attempted to compensate for its budgetary constraints with lively inventiveness, Halloween: Resurrection tries to paper over its utterly unabashed lack of originality with glossy high production values. Needless to say, this none-too-cunning strategy isn’t a particularly successful one, but the real tragedy is that the movie imagines itself to be terribly witty in a very undergraduate kind of way. Sample dialogue – “Guys courted chicks before internet porn man!” or "Hey kids, just take that Kirkegaardian leap of faith!”.

Of course, evoking Danish philosophers does nothing to aid Halloween: Resurrection’s zero rating in the scare stakes. Still, it beats the last Freddy flick hands down.