Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

Halloween: Resurrection arrives as the eighth installment of a franchise already killed, buried, and exhumed at least twice, carrying itself with the weary obligation of a contractual errand. The premise installs a group of college students in Michael Myers's childhood home for an internet reality show, cameras strapped to their heads, the audience watching. Laurie Strode is dispatched in the opening minutes so the film can get on with the business of young people wandering into rooms they should not enter. The house is a set. The murders are a broadcast. The film says so repeatedly and builds nothing from the observation.

Busta Rhymes, Tyra Banks, and Sean Patrick Thomas appear in prominent roles, and Donna Chang is written as an Asian-American student, but the production history makes plain that these choices were aimed at a Black audience, not at any statement about who belongs on screen. The performers get personalities, jokes, and deaths like everyone else. No conversation about race or identity begins, and none is wanted. What the film does offer is a thin swipe at the entertainment industry: a reality producer who stages fake corpses for ratings and promises his contestants they will be paid well if the show works out. The critique extends as far as the next jump scare and stops.

The closing gesture is a brief, muddled admonition about media violence, delivered by a man who has just survived a massacre and then assaults a reporter on live television. John Carpenter later confessed bewilderment at that speech, and he was right to. The sermonizing is faint, unmotivated, and abandoned within seconds, which is the only honest thing about it. For the rest, this is a slasher picture with a webcam gimmick, a studio monetizing a tired property while the culture was still deciding whether reality television was a fad or a permanent condition. It was not a fad. Neither was the sequel.

{"thematic_tags": ["sequel"]}