[HorrorScience] Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

Reading time: 10 minutes

Qualification

Halloween: Resurrection

Year

2002

Duration

94 minutes

Director

Rick Rosenthal

Distribution

Jamie Lee Curtis, Brad Loree, Busta Rhymes, Tyra Banks, Bianca Kajlich, Sean Patrick Thomas, Daisy McCrackin, Katee Sackhoff, Luke Kirby, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Ryan Merriman, Billy Kay

Script

Larry Brand, Sean Hood

After having analyzed Halloween H20 In the previous installment of this cycle dedicated to halloween in HorrorScience, and having negatively criticized the film, accusing it of being more like Scream that the franchise starring Myers is followed by the turn of the eighth film in this saga called Halloween: Resurrection.

And if I called the previous one a film that suffers from "nineties", I will have to criticize this one for suffering from "dosmiltization". And why this? Keep reading to draw your own conclusions.

The story begins as a continuation of H20. As? A continuation? But if…!

Yes, a continuation. It is not unusual to see in this type of cinema, in which they bring out of nowhere a situation that continues the end of the previous one with more or less coherence and credibility and voila, free way to insert another story. This particular case, fortunately, does not suffer the same disastrous fate as most, and the excuse they make is quite plausible thanks also to its simplicity.

After a panorama of a long, humid hallway, we see the hallway of a psychiatric hospital, with a couple of mental patients there and a door at the end. Passing this door is the room of the most famous protagonist of this saga, Laurie Strode, who is hospitalized there for reasons that will be explained to us a few moments later and that are obviously related to the previous film.

While Laurie is there doing her best imitation of Nicolas Cage's face, immersed in a deep depressive state, two nurses appear walking down the aforementioned hallway with their rolling table loaded with plastic cups with pills, and they serve as an excuse for the scriptwriter to have the youngest nurse ask why this patient is hospitalized, and the other nurse briefly tell her who this patient is, while at the same time we visualize some flashbacks with the end of H20 showing us added scenes that explain to us why we are at this point in history now.

Apparently it's been 3 years since the previous events, and Laurie hasn't spoken a single word since, aside from spending all day staring out her bedroom window. We learn this while the nurses are giving Laurie her pills and are so tactless as to discuss this matter in front of the patient herself, other than commenting that the doctor believes she wants to commit suicide and that she was found more than once on the roof of the building, and then saying that "guilt must torment her."

However, once these nurses leave the room we can see that Laurie Strode is a much better actress than Jamie Lee Curtis, because it seems that this whole issue of the trauma she suffers and her behavior is a farce (and she has been fooling even the doctor for 3 years!), and she spits out the pills and keeps them inside her rag doll, which she has on her lap and she has been filling herself with these pills for who knows when. Laurie gets up from her chair and goes to the window, no longer that stupid lost expression she had at the beginning, and Outside is Michael looking towards his window, although after a scene cut where we see Laurie again without her expression changing, when we see the outside again through the window Michael is no longer there. The camera returns to Laurie, and her expression remains unchanged despite Myers' sudden disappearance and the mysterious music playing in the background. If we analyze this situation, we are the ones who have the impression that Myers suddenly disappeared, because in reality Laurie never took her eyes off the window, so she saw Myers there and then as the camera returned to her we surely missed how Michael trotted outside before the camera focused on him again. Now, if we talk more seriously, this scene becomes somewhat ambiguous that does not make it clear to us whether Laurie is hallucinating or not. However, the director decides that a couple of minutes later he will clear us of all doubt, if we have any absurd doubt that Myers is really there.

[HorrorScience] Halloween: Resurrection (2002) — No introductions needed at this point, right?

A guard discovers, perhaps while making his rounds, that one of the doors of the fence that leads to the forest outside is open, and he gets a terrible scare when a guy with a clown mask appears, although he immediately recognizes that it is Harold, a patient of that mental institution who usually puts on masks imitating some known serial killer, of whom he seems to know their entire history, like a fan can know all the information about each of the characters in his favorite TV series.

This guard takes the patient inside, and a few seconds later we see another guard scolding him because on the security monitors A masked man is seen walking through one of the hallways, something that seems inexplicable to the first guard if he has just put Harold in his room. This is why they both go out to put the supposed Harold back into his room, but they end up suffering a rather bloody fate, since Harold is still there where he needs to be (it looks like a homicide detective's office) and the masked man is who we all already suspected he would be: Michael Myers.

After eliminating these guards, Myers goes straight to Laurie's room, and destroys the door by hitting it with his body. He approaches the bed, but Laurie hits him from behind with a lamp and escapes down the hallway. A chase begins that ends on the terrace of the building, where Myers falls into the trap that Laurie prepared a long time ago, probably that time he was on the roof as one of the nurses had commented. However, something happens, and I won't say what so as not to further ruin the plot for anyone who wants to see this movie after reading this review.

About 16 and a half minutes of footage has passed, and really Everything seems to lead us to think that we are facing a true return to the beginnings of this franchise, with a Myers who is a ruthless, strong and violent killer, night scenes, the classic melody of the saga playing in the background at the right moment, and even the scenes shot with a first-person camera from the murderer's view. But once we see a black background with the name of the movie in orange-edged letters, all good things come to an end..

A group of teenagers will participate in a Reality Show that will be broadcast in episodes on the internet, a kind of Big Brother but it will take place in the old Myers family house, where it all began on October 31, 1963, when Michael Myers, being an 8-year-old boy at that time, brutally stabbed his older sister to death. This Reality Show aims to profit from the morbidity of people interested in the story of this murderer, involving as protagonists this group of teenagers who will also carry small cameras on their heads so that the viewer can then choose any camera at will, including the cameras with the point of view of the participants.

And what can happen? Obviously Michael is in the house, and he will go around killing people there. To make everything more attractive to the audience of this film, a well-known rapper and a model were included in its environment, and who were fashionable at that time: Busta Rhymes, and Tyra Banks. And like almost every movie that uses the resource of adding trendy personalities to make it more attractive, the final product ends up being horrible.

As I mentioned before, Halloween: Resurrection It has a very promising beginning, showing that it is still possible to continue with the story of this murderer in an attractive way for the public and respecting the essence of the first two parts and the ideas of its creator, John Carpenter. However, since the title of the film appears on the screen, it seems like it was made by a different group of people. The direction is horrible, the script makes no sense and is also stupid, there are lots of ridiculous scenes, and the actors are on par with everything bad about the movie.

Más allá de que esta cinta diera ganancias (no es muy difícil teniendo un presupuesto de 15 millones de dólares + presupuesto para publicidad + 2 personalidades de moda), se considera un fracaso comercial y de crítica, y marcó el final de la saga, al menos hasta que se decidió hacer un reboot de la misma, el cual cuenta ya con dos partes y comentaré sobre ellas también en este ciclo.

Some curious facts:

El director, Rick Rosenthal, es el mismo que dirigió Halloween II, en 1981. Seguramente por eso la introducción de esta película nos recuerda tanto a esas dos primeras películas de la saga, aunque a partir del minuto 16 haya perdido el camino.
Se escribieron varios finales en el proceso de producción de la película, y a causa de eso el cast no sabía cómo terminaba realmente la película. Se filmaron 4 de esos finales, y la idea del director era enviar a los cines diferentes versiones de entre esas 4. Al estudio no le gustó nada esa idea, así que la película se quedó con un final fijo, y los otros finales pueden encontrarse por internet y en los extras del dvd y bluray.
La actriz Bianca Kajlich, que representó al personaje Sara Moyer, es incapaz de gritar, así que se tuvo que usar a un actor de doblaje para grabar sus gritos en la post-producción.