Resurrection' Is Better Than You Remember (No, Really)

In 1978, John Carpenter changed the horror genre with the release of Halloween. His simple yet terrifying tale about a white masked Boogeyman named Michael Myers stalking through the shadows of suburbia was such a success that it launched dozens of copycats throughout the 80s, most notably Friday the 13th and Jason Voorhees. Halloween copied itself throughout the next few decades as well, with seven sequels coming out over the next quarter of a century before Rob Zombie would reboot the story in 2007. Zombie's turn came after the colossal failure of 2002's Halloween: Resurrection, a movie considered so bad that it killed that timeline's version of Michael Myers forever.

While it's nowhere near the genius of the original or the easy fun of Halloween 2 or Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween: Resurrection doesn't deserve its status as the worst film of the franchise. Though it's flawed, especially with one awful scene in particular, it's also a movie that aimed to get away from the past and make Michael Myers scary again. On that level, it succeeds.

'Halloween: H20' Couldn't Let Michael Myers Die

Going into 2002, the Halloween franchise was in a strange place. After some up-and-down success throughout the slasher craze it birthed in the 80s, the 90s saw a butchered sixth film in 1995, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, where Michael's plot now had him in a cult, and the man behind the heroic Dr. Loomis, Donald Pleasence, passed away before reshoots could be completed. Three years later, Laurie Strode herself, Jamie Lee Curtis, agreed to return one more time if Michael Myers would be killed once and for all. It wasn't that easy. Halloween's producer since the beginning, Moustapha Akkad, couldn't let his crazed cash cow die. There had long been a legal clause that The Shape must always keep coming back for another film, no matter how he "died" in the previous entry. Curtis could have her film, Halloween H20, how she wanted it, but Michael would return. Curtis agreed to come back for the next film after H20, but only if she was killed off in the first act.

The first scene from Halloween: Resurrection is a thrilling one. Laurie Strode is now locked up in a psychiatric hospital just like her brother once was. How she got there was through the convoluted process that brought Michael back from the dead. At the end of H20, Laurie cuts off Michael's head with an ax. There was no coming back from that, except that it wasn't Michael under the mask. Resurrection explains that Michael had attacked an ambulance driver earlier, crushing his windpipe, then putting the overalls and mask on him, before Myers slipped off into the dark. It was instead an innocent man that Laurie killed, causing her to have a mental breakdown. It's a long reach, but out of all the impossible ways to bring Myers back, it's the best that could be hoped for. It kept The Boogeyman alive, but also gave more dimension to Laurie's character at the same time.

'Halloween: Resurrection' Finally Moved on From Laurie Strode

Laurie's death scene is admittedly a little goofy. Setting up a contraption on the hospital roof where Michael has to step into the loop of a rope before Laurie presses a button to raise him off the ground is a bit too Looney Tunes, but it works thanks to the creepy atmosphere of the hospital setting at night, Curtis' great acting no matter what role she's in, and the fact that Michael looked scary again. In H20, with his giant eyeholes, he looked too human, but now the mask was back to being menacing, if a little too angry looking.

Laurie's death, where she falls to over the side of the roof, is lacking, but it accomplishes one huge must: it moves the franchise past its final girl, something which desperately needed to happen. Even though Curtis had only appeared in the first two Halloween movies and H20 at that point, her presence was felt throughout, with Halloween 4-6 focused on her daughter, Jamie (Danielle Harris and J.C. Brandy), and then her infant grandchild. Michael's only goal over the decades was to kill his sister, and when he couldn't get to her, he tried to kill other members of his family. Now that Laurie was finally dead, we got a chance to see The Shape move past the motive that hindered his character. He got to go back to being a motiveless madman for the most part, which has always made him much more terrifying.

Busta Rhymes' Freddie Is 'Halloween: Resurrection's Worst Character

With Laurie dead, Michael just wants to go home, however, his old Haddonfield home is no longer abandoned. An internet reality show called Dangertainment is now there. The series will send several teenagers equipped with cameras into the Myers home on Halloween night to explore the creepy surroundings. The presentation of the home works perfectly. In other sequels, the home was shown to be wildly different from how it was in the first two films. But Resurrection honors the past by getting that basic but necessary part right. If two-thirds of a movie is going to take place in Michael's house, it has to look like the place that first scared us. This is done right because the film's director, Rick Rosenthal, was also the man behind 1981's Halloween 2.

As if the childhood home of an infamous mass murderer isn't enough to be scared of, Dangertainment's director, Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes), has set up props throughout the house, like a highchair with restraints on it, to try to add more to Michael's story and scare his participants and audience. Much of the hate Halloween: Resurrection gets comes from the Freddie character. After casting LL Cool J for a smaller role in H20, the studio must have thought, well, if one famous rapper worked, how about another? While LL Cool J is a good actor, sadly, Busta Rhymes is not. He overdoes it with every line and facial expression, creating a character who's so annoying he takes you out of the movie every time he appears on screen. Worse, he gets in a fight with Michael, doing karate on The Boogeyman, and later, he drops the ultimate cringe-worthy line of "Trick or treat mothafucka."

'Halloween: Resurrection's Lead Cast Is Full of Solid, Slasher Characters

If you can look past Freddie which thankfully doesn't get as much focus as the lead cast, you have some interesting enough, if cookie-cutter, slasher movie characters. You've got the horny one, the cocky one, and the dumb one too, with Katee Sackhoff's Jen battling Michael Myers long before she would be doing battle in The Mandalorian. Of course, you have a new final girl too. Bianca Kajlich didn't give us an iconic final girl for the new millennium in Sarah Moyer. That's okay though. There was no living up to Laurie Strode. And after Jamie went from being a little girl hunted by her uncle to a girl with murderous impulses of her own who shares psychic connections with Uncle Mike, to becoming a prisoner of the Thorn cult, it was nice to just meet a Halloween final girl who was a regular person. It made her and the surrounding plot more relatable.

Sarah is a college student. She's a bit shy, and she's very smart. Her best friend might be some guy her age online who she has never met. This guy, Deckard (Ryan Merriman), will also help Sarah escape Michael from the comfort of his own home. They don't have a very evolved relationship, but it's an interesting one that looks into how our online friends start to become closer than our real-life ones. It's not a deep film, but there's also an intriguing examination of the burgeoning voyeuristic quality of what the internet was quickly becoming.

'Halloween: Resurrection' Goes Back to Being a Simple Slasher Flick

At its heart though, Halloween: Resurrection is a simple slasher movie. It doesn't aim to be more with crazy motives and supernatural shenanigans. Michael Myers goes home, he finds people in his house, he kills them, they fight back, some live, some die. That's it. Throughout, there are some suspenseful chase scenes, a few good kills (including Jen's decapitated head bouncing down the steps), and a finale that sees Sarah going after Michael with a chainsaw and The Boogeyman electrocuted (seemingly to death).

Even though Michael would open his eyes at the morgue, setting up another sequel, this version of The Shape was never seen again. Say what you want about the film, but he was an iconic character that made it through seven films. Five years later, Zombie's reboot would turn him into a white trash-stereotype hulk who kills because he was bullied for being weird. That's not very scary at all. Those films were so disliked that the franchise was rebooted again in 2018, with Jamie Lee Curtis returning in another timeline where nothing after the first film ever happened.

There have been better films before and after Halloween: Resurrection, but despite its flaws, the eighth entry in the franchise should be commended for being bold enough to let go of the past while also trying to return to those roots in a new way. Even Busta Rhymes doing karate can't take that away.