Setting: Grace Andersen Sanatorium, Haddonfield, Halloween

Laurie Strode is locked up at the end of a corridor in the mental institute having been driven mad by the revelation that at the end of Halloween H20 she had not, in fact, decapitated her brother Michael Myers, but a paramedic in a mask instead. Michael Myers soon attacks the institute to get at his sister, who leads him onto the roof where she has laid a trap. Michael walks into it, but Laurie, remembering how she killed the wrong man before, hesitates before
killing him and is killed by Michael.

Meanwhile a group of students at Haddonfield University apply for the chance to spend Halloween in the Myers house for an internet webcast hosted by DangerTainment. Six students qualify and enter the
house, looking to find clues to help explain why Michael Myers became a mass murderer. The house has been rigged with practical joke by DangerTainment boss Freddie Harris in order to keep the broadcast exciting and the students are each hooked up to a camera.

Unknown to all of them, Michael Myers is living in the sewers beneath the house and soon picks them off one-by-one...

Just as Halloween H20 was influenced by Scream, so Halloween: Resurrection was Halloween for the Blair Witch generation.

Instead of a group of students going into the haunted woods with cameras and disappearing, a group of students go into Michael Myers' haunted house wired up to web cameras, and are killed. Much of the 'from
their view' footage is in the same style as in the Blair Witch film, and just as in Blair Witch the students are annoying and you want them to die, the same is true of Resurrection. And
did anyone actually like Blair Witch 2: Book Of Shadows?

Halloween: Resurrection is also very reminiscent of Curse Of Michael Myers. Whereas in Curse it is a radio broadcast that is planned from the Myers' house, the idea has been up-dated to be a web broadcast. Just as in Curse, the radio DJ is killed, in
Resurrection both those behind the cameras and in front of them are picked off one-by-one. Also, both 1999's House On Haunted Hill and The Haunting, both remakes, had similar themes of a
group staying in a haunted building involving practical jokes stage-managed by the one who invited them, only for the house to contain real danger afterall.

The film's main problem is that it is split into three disjointed stories; that of Laurie Strode, Miles and Sara. After the almost irrelevant introductory sequence, in which a few people are murdered and
Laurie Strode is finally killed by Michael Myers, the plot splits into two barely related tales - that of the internet geek who does good, and that of Michael Myers killing those silly enough to spend a night in
his house live on the internet. The character of Miles is one which seems to exist merely to remind the audience about the webcast which is the reason they are in the house to begin with, and other than that he has little bearing on the plot.

The previous Halloween films after Halloween had a unique atmosphere among the slasher genre. Where most slashers were essentially a collection of random teens to be killed, there seemed
to be more of a motive behind Michael Myers' actions. Although he would not hesitate to kill those in his way, he had a purpose to kill members of his family. This, though, seems to have been abandoned for this
film which returns to the 'kill random students' plot as used in the majority of horror films, which detracts from it as a whole.

Other weaknesses are the use of characters in the beginning, such as the mad Harold and the two nurses, merely to have conversations explaining the past films. This exposition seems unnecessary and slows the introduction to the film down.

There are, fortunately, some traditional Halloween moments, for example the university lecture debating the nature of evil echoes similar scenes in Halloween and Halloween H20.

Halloween: Resurrection's main problem is its lack of characters the audience sympathises with. The head of DangerTainment talks to himself and is clearly using the students to make money, yet is not even killed in the film. The heroine Sara is introduced riding a moped on the pavement. This is surely a bigger crime than any committed by Michael Myers? In a genre saturated by scream queens, the impression made by Sara is that she is a woman who rides motorbikes on crowded pavements, and from the start the audience want her to suffer a suitable death as punishment.

Although the film is never as bad as Halloween 5: Revenge Of Michael Myers it continues to draw the series away from the direction Curse was taking it. The explanation of why Michael Myers is alive and did not have his head chopped off is clever, but slows the story down as the audience would not see why having a head detached from the body would necessarily inconvenience a man who has
already been shot, stabbed, burnt, blinded etc in a genre where coming back from the dead is common practice, as Michael's eyes opening at the morgue shows.

The Post Special Supplement

Bluebottle

30.10.03 Front Page

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