I’ll never convince you, or myself, that Halloween: Resurrection is a good Halloween movie. I’m not even going to try to convince you it’s a good movie, period. Too many things are wrong with it, and some of them are wrong in ways that seem almost impossible to explain. Yet every time I revisit it, I’m reminded of something I can’t say about every entry in this franchise: I’m rarely bored.

That might sound like the faintest praise imaginable, and I suppose it is. Halloween 5 and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers can be genuine chores for me to get through. Resurrection, for all its shortcomings, keeps moving. It’s ridiculous, often incoherent, and occasionally so desperate to seem current that it practically dates itself as you watch (“We’re going to be bigger than The Osbornes.”). Somehow, it’s also kind of fun.

We’ve arrived at the eighth Halloween movie, and after H20 gave Laurie Strode what seemed like a definitive victory, the franchise decided to do what it does best: undo the previous movie's ending and find another way to keep Michael Myers employed.

A Title in Search of a Movie

First, can we talk about that title? Halloween: Resurrection is so bland that it almost feels like a placeholder nobody remembered to replace. H20 was a silly title, certainly, but at least it had a personality. Resurrection sounds like someone spent three seconds trying to find a word for “he’s back” and called it a day.

At various points, the project was associated with titles such as Halloween: Homecoming and the wonderfully early-internet-sounding Halloween: MichaelMyers.com. I’ve also seen the former rendered as Halloween: The Homecoming. I understand MichaelMyers.com wasn’t necessarily a serious final-title contender, but I wish it had been. At least it would have announced exactly what sort of nonsense we were about to experience. Even Homecoming has more character than Resurrection.

The Laurie Strode Problem

The first problem is enormous. Remember the end of H20, when Laurie stole the coroner’s van, drove Michael into a tree, and chopped off his head? It was a terrific final image for that version of her story. Resurrection opens by explaining that the person Laurie killed was actually a paramedic. Michael had apparently switched clothes with him, crushed his larynx so he couldn’t speak, and sent him off to be decapitated in Michael’s place.

It’s every bit as awful an explanation as it sounds. Even knowing they had already planned this outcome, and even shot footage for it the day after H20 wrapped, it still doesn’t make much sense. Who we thought was Michael still tries to attack Laurie in the coroner’s van. He flies out of the van’s windshield and is still able to sit back up like Michael Myers. Nothing in the H20 finale, as shown, makes us believe anyone other than Michael Myers is beneath that mask.

 I don’t get furious when a movie takes a creative direction I dislike. I can be frustrated by a character’s behavior within a story when that’s the intended response, but I’m not going to spend my life being personally angry at filmmakers for making a sequel I wouldn’t have made. I just think this particular decision is terrible. It asks the audience to discard H20's emotional payoff for a twist that doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.

Three years later, Laurie is at Grace Andersen Sanitarium, where Nurse Wells (Lorena Gale) fills in the backstory as she walks a new employee (Marisa Rudiak) to Laurie’s room to deliver her nighttime medication. There’s also Harold (Gus Lynch), a patient fascinated with serial killers who likes wearing their masks and reciting trivia, and a pair of security guards (Brent Chapman, Dan Joffre) whose employment screening apparently didn’t assess their ability to handle anything remotely dangerous. Michael also arrives that night to finish what H20 supposedly didn’t.

After Laurie pulls her best MacGyver act and traps Michael on the sanitarium’s roof, she has him exactly where she wants him, but the paramedic incident makes her hesitate. She needs to check beneath the mask before killing him. That gives Michael his opening, and he stabs her and sends her falling to her death. Before she goes, she kisses him. There’s a story floating around that director Rick Rosenthal thought the kiss might earn an MTV Movie Award nomination for “Best Kiss”. I can’t verify that story, but the fact that it sounds vaguely plausible tells you something about the movie we’re watching.

I understand why a production might have wanted to conclude Laurie’s involvement quickly if Jamie Lee Curtis wasn’t interested in carrying another sequel. Other proposed directions include a concept from Daniel Farrands called Halloween: Lord of the Dead that reportedly would have kept Laurie central. Whatever the development history, the version on screen spends its opening killing off the person who made the previous movie matter, which is irritating enough, but then more or less forgets that opening ever happened.

Two Movies That Barely Speak to Each Other

Once Laurie is gone, we abruptly relocate to Haddonfield for the actual premise: an internet reality show called Dangertainment broadcasts a group of college students spending Halloween night inside the old Myers house. Michael, naturally, has other plans. Aside from Michael Myers, the opening and the rest of the film might as well be separate movies.

Apparently, an earlier version would have included a detective following the trail from the sanitarium back to Haddonfield. Michael leaves his knife in Harold’s room, seemingly attempting to implicate him in the murders. A detective recognizing that something didn’t add up could have provided at least a thread connecting the two stories. In the finished film, we’re left with the Laurie prologue, an abrupt reset, and little sense that one story affects the other.

To be fair, a Halloween movie about Michael Myers simply killing a collection of people who happen to enter his house is not inherently a bad idea. I’m all for stepping away from the family mythology, psychic connections, and convoluted explanations that weighed down earlier sequels. The original Halloween didn’t need Michael to have a complicated reason for choosing his victims. This one could have used that simplicity to its advantage. Instead, it opens with the most consequential piece of mythology it could revisit, then treats everything after that like an unrelated assignment.

Welcome to Dangertainment

Freddy Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston (Tyra Banks) are the faces behind Dangertainment, an online event designed to capitalize on the early-2000s reality-television and internet crazes. The students will wear cameras and investigate the Myers house while an audience follows along. It’s a perfectly reasonable concept for a 2002 slasher movie. The trouble is that it never feels particularly convincing as an actual show.

The program seems to exist because the filmmakers have identified several things that were fashionable at the time and decided to put them all in the same house. The supposed production feels haphazard, the participants aren’t especially compelling, and the material doesn’t seem like it would hold an audience for long, even if nobody started getting murdered. Watching people wander around rooms with cameras attached to them is not, by itself, an entertainment strategy.

Still, the body-camera idea occasionally gives the movie some energy. The different perspectives make the house feel like a chaotic collection of blind spots, and there’s something fascinating about the technical challenge of assembling those images into a coherent movie. Unfortunately, fascinating as a production exercise and interesting as a viewing experience are two different things. Much of the footage is dull, and the editing rarely makes the gimmick consistently suspenseful.

After the comparatively polished H20, Resurrection also returns to the grittier, more frantic visual style I associate with The Curse of Michael Myers. This movie looks and feels like it was assembled, disassembled, and reassembled. The result is sometimes energetic, but just as often it feels like the movie is trying to cut around material that no longer fits.

The Case of the Missing Firebird

One of my favorite examples of the film’s patchwork construction involves a red 1969 Pontiac Firebird. A workprint sequence shows Michael stealing the car. The scene was removed, but the Firebird still appears elsewhere in the movie, including when Sara Moyer (Bianca Kajlich) is trying on clothes and thinks she sees Michael outside a storefront window.

When Sara looks again, Michael is gone, and what she actually sees is a mother helping her child with a Halloween costume. We do, however, see the red Firebird parked outside the store. Without knowing Michael stole or is driving that car, though, it's a meaningless prop. Now, the moment plays almost like Sara has had a vision of Michael. We’ve been down the unexplained-psychic-connection road before in this franchise, and I have no desire to go back. If they had kept the missing scene intact, the Firebird suggests Michael really was nearby. Without it, the film accidentally creates a mystery it has no interest in answering.

There’s a simpler question, too: why is Michael apparently keeping tabs on Sara and the other participants before they arrive at his house? Once they’re inside, I have no trouble believing he’d start killing them. It’s his house, after all, but the idea that he’s tracking the Dangertainment cast in advance requires information the finished movie never provides. Perhaps another abandoned scene explained it; perhaps not. I can only judge the version I’m watching, and that version leaves too many annoying gaps for the audience to fill. Do we need everything explained? Of course not. However, when my lack of understanding of why something happens in a scene takes me completely out of the movie, then we have a more serious problem.

Considering I flat-out complained about a similar stolen-car scene in H20, it’s funny I’m complaining they didn’t include one in Resurrection, but here we are. I stand by my complicated opinions.

Busta Rhymes Understands the Assignment

Now for the defense I know won’t win me many converts: I think Busta Rhymes is pretty good in this movie, or at the very least, I don’t think he’s the problem many detractors have anointed. Not because Freddy Harris is some beautifully written character, or because the performance belongs in an awards conversation. It’s because Busta understands exactly how much energy this material needs, and he gives it everything he has.

I’ve heard a rumor that they considered bringing back LL Cool J’s Rodney from H20, possibly in some variation of the role Freddy eventually became. I’m glad that didn’t happen. Rodney was enjoyable in that movie, but Resurrection needs the particular force of personality Busta brings. He plays like a man who's decided that if this movie is going to be ridiculous, he might as well be the most entertaining thing in it.

“Trick or treat, motherfucker” might be the single most absurdly wonderful line in the entire franchise. It has no business working as well as it does. During my years writing CinemaSins scripts, I kept returning to that outtake audio whenever somebody suddenly emerged from the darkness in a horror movie—or, really, almost any movie. It’s that kind of line. Once you hear it, you start finding excuses to hear it again.

One of the weirdest moments I've completely changed my tune on is the scene where Freddy, dressed as Michael Myers to scare the actors, is confronted by the real Michael Myers. Freddy assumes it's just one of his assistants (who we already know has been killed) pretending to be Michael. He berates him, tells him to leave, and the real Michael Myers does exactly that. He turns around and walks away.

Watching this scene in theaters in 2002 made me shake my head. While I still shake my head today, I've developed a weird appreciation for just how ridiculous this movie was willing to get, and how close it came to pulling it off. The scene feels more at home in a bizarre Italian horror movie from the '80s, and the fact that anyone thought to include it in a major horror franchise's theatrical release in the 2000s will always make me smile.

Then there’s Freddy’s climactic confrontation with Michael, featuring a little martial-arts instruction that has become one of Resurrection’s defining moments. Is it stupid? Absolutely. Would the movie improve if it took itself more seriously and removed that sequence? I genuinely don’t think so. Busta’s enthusiasm is practically the film’s life support system. Pull it out, and I’m not sure what’s left to keep this thing breathing.

A Cast Looking for Characters

The rest of the cast isn’t bad, either. Bianca Kajlich is Sara, our nominal protagonist, while Katee Sackhoff, Sean Patrick Thomas, and Thomas Ian Nicholas are among the young performers recruited for the event. Tyra Banks is along for the ride as Nora. These are capable, recognizable people, and several do what they can to make their thinly drawn characters register.

Sara is a particularly frustrating case because the movie keeps suggesting there’s more to her than it intends to deliver. Freddy becomes interested in casting her after hearing her supposedly extraordinary scream. The scream is treated like a defining talent, then essentially forgotten. The reported production story adds another layer of irony: Kajlich’s scream had to be dubbed by another performer. Whether every detail of that anecdote is accurate or not, the scene’s lack of payoff shows on screen.

Sara also suffers from many of the same problems Kara did in The Curse of Michael Myers. Resurrection wants you to believe she's the protagonist, but it never gives her enough agency to feel like one. She doesn't even have the excuse of being upstaged by a Dr. Loomis or Tommy Doyle. Despite Kajlich giving everything she's got, the character remains flat and far too uninteresting to build a movie around. If this was supposed to be the franchise's new Laurie Strode, they failed.

Then we have Decker (Ryan Merriman), Sara’s online correspondent, who watches the livestream and begins sending her advice when the danger becomes real. He’s a potentially useful device: somebody outside the house can see things the participants cannot. Unfortunately, his character also seems stranded by changes to the ending. An earlier version reportedly had him arrive at the house to rescue Sara, whereas the finished film gives Freddy the more memorable heroics.

The movie also reveals that Decker has misrepresented himself online, presenting himself as a graduate student when he is actually still in high school. The film treats it as a cute romantic complication rather than the unsettling deception it is. I’m not sure that storyline would have played any better had the original rescue ending survived. As it stands, Decker is another example of a character introduced with more narrative purpose than the final cut allows.

Rick Rosenthal Returns

There’s an interesting piece of franchise history here: Rick Rosenthal, who directed Halloween II, became the first filmmaker to return to direct another Halloween entry. Rob Zombie and, later, David Gordon Green would join that club, with Green eventually directing three installments. Dwight H. Little has also reportedly been mentioned as someone approached about returning before Rosenthal took the job.

It’s strange to put Halloween II and Resurrection side by side and remember that the same director made them. I have my problems with Halloween II, but its filmmaking has a basic steadiness that Resurrection often lacks. The newer movie is choppier, uglier, and far less assured in how it moves from one scene to another.

I’m reluctant to place all of that on Rosenthal. Halloween II was a Universal release following an enormous independent success, while Resurrection feels like a franchise installment being pushed through a commercial machine determined to extract another return from Michael Myers. We already discussed how H20 came close to being a much smaller, potentially direct-to-video project. A film that appears to have undergone significant rewriting, shooting, and editing changes isn't necessarily a fair measure of what its director intended.

That doesn’t make the finished film better, of course. It simply makes me hesitant to turn a visibly troubled production into a one-person blame story. Whatever combination of decisions got Resurrection to the screen, the evidence of those decisions is all over the movie.

The Boogeyman Deserves Better. I Still Had Fun.

Resurrection has a perfectly workable core idea. Put strangers in the Myers house, let Michael move through the dark, and use the cameras to play with what the audience can and cannot see. Give the participants personalities worth caring about, and there’s a lean, nasty Halloween sequel hiding in there somewhere. Instead, we get a movie that opens by destroying H20's conclusion, spends the rest of its runtime chasing an internet fad, and repeatedly forgets what it set up.

The characters are too shallow, the suspense is too inconsistent, and the whole enterprise feels like several drafts of several different movies fighting for control. I don’t think the film is secretly misunderstood, and I’m certainly not going to pretend the martial-arts finale is some bold artistic achievement. It’s a mess. On most measures I’d use to judge a Halloween movie, it fails.

Yet here we are, and I’ve spent this much time talking about a movie I can sit through more easily than a couple of the series' supposedly more respectable entries. Busta Rhymes is a big part of that, so is the sheer audacity of a sequel that can kill Laurie Strode, stage a webcast in Michael Myers’ childhood home, and then have a reality-show producer kick Michael across a room. I wouldn’t automatically call that good filmmaking, but I would call it difficult to forget.

Maybe that’s the most generous thing I can say about Halloween: Resurrection: it’s bad, but it has a pulse, sometimes faint, sometimes wildly irregular. Still, unlike a few earlier trips to Haddonfield, this one never quite puts me to sleep.

THE FIXATION SCALE

★★☆☆

2 out of 4