Halloween: Resurrection

Blame Wes Craven. Whether you love or hate the Scream trilogy, its impact on the slasher genre - not merely its successors but also its predecessors and sources of inspiration - was unprecedented and immeasurable. We were given, for perhaps the first time, a bunch of characters who knew they were in a scary movie, took notice of all the rules for survival and still met a grizzly end. More than this, the Scream set forced us to take a look back at older films and view them with a heightened state of awareness. After Scream, the rules changed. It had woken up cinema audiences and made them realise that they had been subjected to cliché for years - and anything that follows is generally only ensured box-office success by somehow modifying the genre, whether it is with a conceptual self-awareness, or an unexpected plot twist, or a heightened style.

Unfortunately, this rewritten rule book doesn't stop dross like Halloween: Resurrection being made. It was all going so well: 1998's H20, with its intense set pieces, clever plotting and general sense of completeness, had breathed new life into an increasingly tired series. For the next film in the set, we are led to the original house where the Myers murders happened, and where a group of students are invited to take part in a live webcast exploring the house and looking for "clues" as to why Myers became so inexplicably evil.

This is bad enough. We're already expected to believe that no one has realised that sending a group of young people round an old abandoned house on October 31st is just asking for trouble. Things go from bad to worse, however, when every horror cliché in the book is pounded out with a vengeance. Security guards hear blood curdling screams and, rather than radioing for extra help, decide to investigate the source of the noise alone. Two of the students decide to have sex for no real reason at all other than to instigate an inappropriate mid-coital interruption from the killer. And characters develop an annoying tendency to divert their gaze from the monitor screens the moment something unpleasant happens: the first time it's contrived but still faintly plausible, but when it later happens again your suspension of disbelief is stretched to breaking point.

None of this would matter, of course, had Resurrection been delivered with the same wink at the audience that H20 seemed to provide, but this pivotal lack of self-awareness is one of the film's biggest downfalls. You get the feeling throughout that you are supposed to take this absolutely seriously, and sweat and scream in all the right places without even stopping to ask "why on earth are they doing that?!?". The plot developments are predictable and unsatisfying and the ending is overwhelmingly self-righteous and preachy. The film does absolutely nothing new in its admittedly short run time, except for adhering to every rule in the book with utterly reverential sincerity...but it's too little, too late, and we're not buying it anymore. The webcast approach has ill-used potential: once you've got used to the clearest, smoothest video stream in history and the use of micro-fast PDA emails to determine the killer's position in the house, you realise that this is nothing new. It's the sort of social commentary on the nature of voyeurism that My Little Eye dealt with to a much higher standard.

Performances are decent enough for a slasher flick, with Bianca Kajlich doing a steady - if somewhat bland - job as the twitchy heroine. She isn't helped, of course, by a diabolical script, which does absolutely nothing to flesh out the characters, so that when they start dropping like flies we don't know enough about them to care - and realise, in fact, that some of them are irritating enough to deserve nothing less than a slow and painful death. Busta Rhymes whoops and wails as the slick media puppy controlling things behind the scenes, and despite regularly lapsing into his hip hop persona he does, at least, deliver the one line of dialogue that's worth waiting for. But not even the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis - in a semi-interesting, if ultimately rather pointless cameo - can save this garbage. Rest in peace, Michael. Please. This time we really mean it.

(Sunday, 20th April 2003)