Halloween: Resurrection (aka Busta vs. Michael)

A cheap, pathetic, uninspired cash grab. This movie's doomed from the start. Bringing back the director of the dull Halloween 2 for one. And Busta Rhymes getting top billing is just a sign that the movie's going to be a joke, and it is. And not a good joke at that.

The first fifteen minutes of the movie does its best to completely ruin H20, what it had accomplished, and its stellar ending scene. Laurie had taken her fate into her hands and runs over Michael, the van crash resulting in Michael being pinned between the vehicle and a tree. Laurie approaches him and for the first time in his six appearances, we get a reaction out of Michael. Michael's confused, panicked. He doesn't know what to do, and reaches out to Laurie. For a split second, both the viewer and Laurie take a kind of pity on him. But just as quickly, Laurie lops off his head as the Halloween theme kicks in. It was a great way to wrap up her storyline, it was a great send-off for Michael. A brutal, but strong finish to the movie...

We're not fools, we know that the power of corporate greed will resurrect Michael, but I don't think you could come up with a stupider way to explain his return than what Resurrection offers, which is something that COMPLETELY -- COMPLETELY! -- ruins not only H20's final scene, but the entire movie (and the Laurie Strode character -- why break one thing when you can break a bunch of things is Resurrection's motto). Apparently, that crafty Michael, at one point in H20's final act, switched places with a paramedic. That's right, Michael crushes the guy's larynx and swaps outfits with him. Never before have we seen Michael concoct such plans and be steps ahead like this, but, hey... Meanwhile, this genius paramedic is just stumbling around. I mean, think of the end of H20. Michael's trying to attack Laurie, he ambushes her from the back of the van, he walks off flying through the windshield when she wrecks it, he survives the crash that only Michael could...but apparently it's just Bob, the stupidest paramedic who ever lived. When he's pinned between a van and a tree, larynx or no, I think he'd be doing more than holding his head and reaching out to Laurie, as she approaches him with an axe. But, hey, fuck logic when we can ruin a good sequel to pump out a shit one. Too bad they decided against having Michael call out Laurie's name in that last H20 scene, proving it's Michael, and maybe making the Resurrection writers come up with a less stupid retcon.

Laurie beheads Stupid the Paramedic and snaps as a result. She should have just shaken it off like Loomis. "Oh, well, that's the price for looking like Michael Myers, Ben Tramer." Besides this wonderful retcon, which is shat upon us with an extremely clumsy exchange between two Academy Award-winning actresses, Michael just happens to find this mental hospital Laurie's at. Despite the misleading ads -- when I saw the ads, I thought Laurie was going to be the franchise's new Loomis -- Jamie Lee Curtis only agreed to come back if she gets killed at the movie's start, so Laurie gets to look stupid and gets one of the most lackluster death scenes in the history of horror. Fans love Laurie Strode, they think she's a strong character. We've seen her survive for three movies now. Jamie Lee Curtis is a popular actress, one of the genre's biggest successes. I think the character deserved a little more than being suckered into a trick of Michael's, stabbed, and tossing off a super-generic "See you in hell" line before falling to a CGI doom. It's bullshit.

The movie thinks it's one of those slick '90s, Scream-y, WB-star studded slasher movies, but it looks like it has the budget of a Sega CD game, with the cheapness of Canadian cost-cutting to match. (The whole point of having it be a "reality" show, filmed on mini-cams, is cheapness and convenience on the filmmakers' part.) It wants to be timely, but it's instantly dated, with reality shows, internet broadcasts and chat rooms playing important roles in the movies. The characters are uninteresting, the kills are dopey, and the way they have characters distracted in order for any killing to go on in such a tiny location (the entire action takes place in the Myers HOUSE) is dumb. (Tyra Banks misses one of her cameramen being killed because she's too busy dancing while making an cappuccino.)

And the movie just keeps kicking you in the face with one stupid scene after another. (Like Busta Rhymes dressed like Michael "hilariously" dressing down the real Michael, who he thinks is a fake. Sides split, man.) Even if you disregard the insulting stupidity of the first fifteen minutes and how it desecrates a far superior movie, you're left with an incredibly weak, forgettable, bottom of the barrel movie with an ill-fitting gimmick.

The movie would have been better off not even including Jamie Lee Curtis or trying to explain Michael's surviving H20 -- the movie's so corny that they might as well have just made it Michael's spirit haunting the Myers house and terrorizing the contestants of Busta Rhymes' terrible reality show. A lousy premise is bad enough, but tanking H20 adds insult to injury; because even if you remove the first 15 minutes, you'd still be left with the movie that killed the franchise. It's that bad, judged on its own. Every one of the slasher movies has its own worst, horrid, unwatchable movie, and this one is definitely Halloween's, and a close race with Hellraiser: Hellworld for title of Worst of the Worst Sequels. It was a damn struggle to rewatch this movie to write about it. There's no redeeming quality to it, nothing but the pathetic death rattle of the franchise. It's boring. It's dumb. It's cheap. I mean, unless you're into following boring assholes around as they stumble through one location with Fear Factor cams strapped to them, with lame-ass jump scares and fake-out scares in pixelated quality that subliminally slip in shots of Michael, in case you've (understandably) forgotten what you're watching.

And so, the movie that had the gall to call itself Resurrection ended up destroying the franchise as we knew it. The death rattle of this franchise sounds a little like Busta Rhymes making Bruce Lee noises as he kung-fu fights Michael Myers. (Which IS something that happens.) It also sounds a little like the Curly Howard noise Michael makes when Busta Rhymes puts a jumper cable on his nutsack and sets him ablaze. (Which IS something that happens.) Dimension really should have refunded people's money and sent them notes of apology.

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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

I'm always surprised when I see horror fans diss this movie. To me, it's pretty much the only good sequel, the only truly well made sequel. Even though I could be accused of being biased, because director Steve Miner's two Friday the 13th sequels are two of my favorite movies of that franchise, he's come a long way since those movies -- H20 has a style and polish. People accuse it of being Scream-like, but...it has the gloss of that movie, the obnoxious kids-pulled-from-the-WB, but it's nowhere near as obnoxious and winky-winky. (It pushes the limits with the Psycho references, but those are mostly harmless. I could see people saying the recreations of bits from the first movie is too self-referential, but this was an anniversary movie, so some of those nods just had to be made.) My main problem with it is trying to ignore the idiotic retcon in Resurrection, and just trying to forget that dismal movie when watching this one, which is difficult.

The premise is simple, but good: we catch up with Laurie Strode after all these years, on the day of the year she most dreads. She tries to get by with numbing herself with drinks and painkillers, but as hard as she tries, the pain -- and Michael -- remains. And no matter how many times she tries to convince herself she's imagining things, she knows -- Michael is back and if she wants a shot at peace, she's going to finally have to settle things with him. The movie has a breezy running time, which makes me wonder if there's a lot of cut footage, but it wastes no time and doesn't bore you.

There are a couple of great moments in this movie, like when Laurie's trying hard to close her eyes and basically wish Michael away -- but, at some point, instead of vanishing as usual, his image keeps charging her way. Another of my favorite scenes is when her son and his girlfriend are pinned between Michael and a locked door, and as Laurie successfully opens the door, letting the two in to safety, she slams the door just in time from Michael, finally coming face to face with him and realizing her nightmare's come true. But my favorite scene is when Laurie sends everyone away from the campus, grabbing an axe, closing the gates and sealing herself in with Michael, with the Halloween theme song kicking on. It's such a badass moment, she's taking control of things, and there's such a finality to the movie from this moment on, it's a serious, damn, stinking, filthy, rotten shame that the horrendous diarrhea tsunami of a follow-up ruins it all.

If there's a weakness to the movie, it's that I often don't feel like I'm watching the past catch up with Laurie Strode. Instead, I feel more like it's Jamie Lee Curtis herself. (Like most Hollywood stars, Curtis reached a point where she just started playing a version of herself in most movies. Curtis is a cool, strong, gutsy lady, and that's what comes through most of her roles, and it's not a bad persona to have. She's a reliable performer.) I'll try to think of the Laurie Strode from the first two movies and just see Jamie Lee Curtis, and can't help but see her determination to be rid of Michael as representing Curtis' own ambivalence to the horror genre and its fans.

And it's this movie I was referring to before as having one of the stupidest decisions in a horror movie. Jodi Lyn O'Keefe's injured character decides to try to escape Michael by placing herself in a dumbwaiter. At least Jamie was just a kid when she made the stupid choice to hide in a laundry chute...

All in all, the idea for this movie is just brilliant, because things were looking grim for this franchise after ho-hum and flat out bad sequels, and this was a great way at getting interest and eyeballs back on the series. I have to wonder, though, if this movie would exist without Wes Craven's New Nightmare, as if Jamie Lee Curtis saw that movie and was like "Hey! For the 10th anniversary of Freddy, they got back the first movie's heroine and staff, let's do that with Halloween for its 20th!"

TO BE CONTINUED...

Halloween II (The Search For More Money)

As long as I've been into the franchise, there were only three Halloween movies that mattered to me -- 1, 2, H20. The Laurie Strode Trilogy. I used to enjoy a couple of the sequels, like 4 and 5, but even before I turned on them, I always knew they were nothing compared to The Laurie Trilogy. That said, I always liked Halloween II the least of the three. When I'll think back on the movie, I'll always just feel a negative dislike, so I was surprised when I just rewatched it and found myself enjoying it. But I realized the problem -- I'll enjoy the first half hour, which is tying up the events of the first movie, but the movie comes to a screeching halt when all of the action moves to the hospital. To say it drags is an understatement. I find this section, which is most of the movie, to be interminable.

Even though John Carpenter and Debra Hill returned to script the movie, it's in a weaker director's hands, and it just always seemed to me like Carpenter and Hill didn't really know what to do with a follow-up. Michael Myers kills a lot of people he doesn't need to, but he also kills a lot of motherfucking time. Segments, which I suppose are meant to be suspenseful, just DRAG, and you don't care about most of the people featured, and the man behind Michael's mask in this movie (Dick Warlock) is the slowest Michael of all -- it's like watching slow-motion footage of a mime performing on the moon -- so the movie becomes even MORE sluggish seeming. It's torturous!

And it's just too similar to the first one -- albeit diluted and excised of what made the first one good -- that if you watch it too close to the first one, it becomes even more torturous for its similarity, especially the soundtrack. Yes, I know Carpenter's music is classic, but it's practically the same three pieces that plays throughout the movie, and here it's the same three pieces again. (The music in II is even worse, though, for sounding about as the same quality as the Atari game's music.)

It's a mistake to have Laurie be so incapacitated for the movie (it's practically a silent performance on Jamie Lee Curtis' part), and Loomis is already descending into parody. Rather than the driven Van Helsing of the first one, here he just sounds like an idiot or a lunatic in his obsession, ready to gun down or kill anything that he thinks looks close to Michael Myers. (Indeed, he gets Laurie's crush from the first film, Ben Tramer, killed for wearing a Michael-like mask. Laurie just can't catch a break. And, besides, Ben was swinging a trick-or-treat bag. Really, Loomis? You thought Michael was walking around Haddonfield with a trick-or-treat bag he was swingin' around? And you didn't notice that this "Michael" was a good two feet shorter? And walked FAST?!)

Then the action moves to the hospital, filled with characters we don't give a shit about, as we're forced to watch Michael pick them all off. Now, the first movie's victims seemed randomly picked, but there was a weird kind of logic to their selection. Michael saw and heard Laurie and little Tommy Doyle at his house, so that put them on his radar. He sees Laurie and her friends taunt him as he passes by. He kills a guy for his clothing, and Linda's boyfriend for possibly being an obstacle; he kills one dog for food and another because it was drawing attention. In Halloween II, he's just killing anybody who has the misfortune of being in the script, and it's just dull and becomes one of the lesser, routine slasher movies. (The most unnecessary kill of the entire movie is the teen on the phone at the beginning; there's absolutely no reason for Michael to kill her, and his springing into frame as if just launched from a jack-in-the-box looks silly as shit.) The movie is inconsistent with Laurie's state of recovery, Loomis is lost twiddling his thumbs until it's time to wrap the movie up, and characters have random Bouts of Stupid happen to them that makes Michael's job easier. Why is the hospital so damned empty anyway? Just Laurie, an infant and the kid with the razor in his mouth as patients, but way over-staffed in favor of Michael's kill list.

If there's one segment of the first movie I don't like, it's the scene(s) with Annie babysitting. They just linger on too long, her talking on the phone, locking herself in the laundry and so on, all while Michael walks back and forth in the background. It's meant to be suspenseful, but it's not interesting enough to maintain your interest and you're just bored. Well, Halloween II is practically that scene stretched for an entire movie. Take the scene with the security guard, where we're following his every move as he's supposed to be investigating the source of the dead phone-line. (We're even treated to him searching the dumpster -- searching the dumpster? -- and a ZINGING JUMP SCARE as a cat jumps out at him. The old cat jumping out and scaring a character/not scaring the audience was a cliche even in the '40s.)

One last thing: the character of Jimmy Lloyd, who takes an interest in Laurie even though she's a teenager and he's well out of college and it's OK. We know nothing about this guy, but we're meant to care about him. He's also a total bonehead and later on gives Laurie's location away to Michael by passing out and falling onto the horn of the car Laurie's hiding in. That's the last we see of old Jimmy in the movie, folks. Well, unless you've seen the movie on TV with the alternate ending where he joins Laurie in the ambulance and a budding romance is hinted at. That's weird and all, but not as weird as Halloween 4 picking up on this alternate/deleted scene and having Danielle Harris' Jamie Lloyd be the daugher of Laurie and Jimmy, something you'd NEVER know if you hadn't seen the alternate ending or heard about it. Why'd they do that? Reminds me of the way Superman Returns was built off of the then-unseen Richard Donner cut of Superman II.

TO BE CONTINUED...

John Carpenter's Halloween (aka "The Good One")

In the 1990s, I was fairly obsessed with the Halloween franchise. I owned the tapes, watched them a bunch. I made my mom reserve this lifesize cardboard cutout Michael Myers VHS display from Blockbuster, which she will probably still complain about what a pain it was fitting it in our car if reminded about it. I had a pretty pricey Don Post Michael Myers mask and went trick or treating as Michael Myers quite a few times. (I did my best George Wilbur zombie waltz. Why Wilbur? No particular reason. Wilbur was the latest Myers, it's not like he was my favorite.)

I was never as into the Halloween series as I was the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, but I was still snobbish at that point about the Friday the 13ths and those types of movies, and thought Halloween stood well above those. The franchise had been in a dry spell when I got into them. It was a pretty lengthy amount of time between Part 5 and Part 6, and I remember being SO excited to see Part 6 in the theater and just sitting there in horror at how goddamn terrible it was. But, for as bad as that movie is, my love for the franchise remained. Believe it or not, even worse entries would come along and finish the job that not even the truly terrible Part 6 could manage -- kill my love for the franchise. Kill it dead. Kill it to the point where I not only feel nothing for the franchise, but I became a bigger Jason Voorhees fan over time. (Yes, at this point, I'd probably pop in a turd like Jason Takes Manhattan over even the best of the Halloween franchise.)

So, the Halloween franchise hasn't been on my mind for a while. But I recently picked up the producer's cut of Halloween 6 on Blu-ray because I've heard so much about it over the years (and didn't care enough to sit through the bootlegs that had been the only option to see it until now). And then I watched H20, which I used to think highly of, but the vicious killer known as Shit Sequel has even diminished my love for that one. (And Shit Sequel has had quite a way with the Halloween franchise. Quite a way.) I used to love these movies, think so highly of them, have such fun with them. With the pain and embarrassment of the remake a fading memory, could I again find enjoyment in the original movies? So, I decided to revisit the franchise. Would I feel a flicker of my past feelings? Would I manage to not enjoy the movies even more? Let's find out in part 1 of a 10-part entry.

JOHN CARPENTER'S HALLOWEEN (None of this "Halloween 1978" shit. There's only one first Halloween movie, and that's John Carpenter's.)

The classic, the one with the most genuine scares. Being a classic, being synonymous with the actual holiday, it's one of the most-killed horror movies, so over-familiarity puts some shackles on it. It's not the deepest movie, but it's good at what it does, it features some iconic performances and some fun, relatable teen characters. (I feel like the only fan who appreciates Nancy Loomis' droll performance as the jaded Annie.) Carpenter is good at squeezing out suspense, but squeeze it he does -- there's a couple of segments that go on just a little too long, in my opinion, but not enough to damage the movie. (No, no. That's a job left to the sequels.)

Nick Castle's Michael Myers is also the best Myers. He's slow, as the role requires for whatever reason, but he moves quickly when he needs to. His Michael feels the most "normal," seeming angry and frustrated, just lashing out in attack, rather than some of the other Michael's calculated robotic movements. Castle's movements and body language makes for a Michael you can be scared of, not one you laugh at because his victim is two states over by the time he crosses the street.

I also think Donald Pleasence comes across best in this movie. Loomis here is all determination and urgency, but also a bundle of jittery nerves. Everything we know about Michael Myers comes from Carpenter's creepy yet dressed up speeches made by Loomis, and Pleasence always knows how to deliver those and more. The "Loomis Speeches" here are effective at how they convey Michael's viciousness, but also Loomis' terror at failing to ever get through to or hold onto his patient. A lot of the sequels don't quite get the Loomis Speech right again, they just become watered down riffs of his dialogue here, and they're never quite as effective and they really push Loomis and his whole Loomis Speeching into self-parody, which unfortunately backwashes even onto this one.

One last thing I'd like to say is that when I just rewatched this movie, I chose to watch it on VHS. The coloring is murky -- sometimes TOO damn dark to really see anything -- but, man, it really helps sell the atmosphere of the movie. When Laurie's walking around Haddonfield, it looks like a grey, gloomy fall day. When I've seen this movie on DVD or on TV, it's a crisp, restored version that makes Haddonfield seem constantly sunny. The crisp picture is nice and all, especially being able to see more moments of Michael looming (I never knew until the DVD that he's staring at Laurie and her friends as he drives by them), but not at the expense of atmosphere.

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