Halloween: Resurrection

Year of Release: 2002
Director:  Rick Rosenthal
Written By: Larry Brand and Sean Hood, from a story by Sean Hood and based on characters created by Debra Hill and John Carpenter
Starring: Busta Rhymes, Bianca Kajlich, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Ryan Merriman, Sean Patrick Thomas, Tyra Banks and Jamie Lee Curtis
Running Time: 90 minutes

This is the eighth film in the Halloween series of horror films, and follows on from the conclusion of the previous entry Halloween H20:  20 Years Later (1998).  After a prologue featuring Laurie Strode (Curtis) in a psychiatric hospital after the events of the previous film, the story proper begins a year later when six students take part in a live on-line broadcast called Dangertainment run by producer Freddie Harris (Rhymes) where they have to spend Halloween night in the childhood home of serial killer Michael Myers (Brad Loree) and discover what led him to kill.  Needless to say, the real Myers soon pops up and begins slicing and dicing.

By the time this film was released, the resurgence in popularity of slasher movies in the wake of Scream (1996) and it's sequels had fully died out and there is the feeling watching it that by this time even the filmmakers had basically stopped caring about the Michael Myers story, which is more or less wrapped up in the prologue (as with it's predecessor, this film completely ignores the fourth, fifth and sixth film, and the third film doesn't feature Myers and has nothing to do with the rest of the Halloween series).

There are some interesting ideas here.  The live internet broadcast thing is interesting, but isn't really developed, and the themes of reality television and violence as entertainment have been dealt with before.  The idea of showing people at a party watching the broadcast and commenting on it is sometimes amusing and sometimes irritating.  The cast are mostly bland, with only Busta Rhymes having any real character, and Jamie Lee Curtis who only appears in a cameo, has nothing to do.  The direction is pretty workmanlike (Rick Rosenthal previously directed Halloween II (1981)).  Another problem is that it is shot so darkly it is hard to see what is happening a lot of the time.

It's really only for Halloween fans.