Hey, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab.
Sweet Jesus. Are they actively trying to see how bad they can make these films at this point?!
First things first: let’s put a moratorium on the use of the word “RESURRECTION” in a franchise title. It’s bad hoodoo, cursed ground at this point. ALIEN: RESURRECTION looked cool on paper, but it just never worked as a movie when it was all put together. This film doesn’t even have a bit of promise in the premise. Far from it. This film is tired as soon as it begins, a threadbare excuse for trotting out something that vaguely resembles the mask from the first film. And at this point, the mask is all that matters, since there’s nothing like consistent characterization or narrative coherence holding this franchise together.
Let me try and put this in perspective for you.
Rick Rosenthal directed this movie.
This is the same Rick Rosenthal who started his career by having John Carpenter step in to famously reshoot much of HALLOWEEN 2. That’s so insane that it requires me to say it again. They removed him from the movie. From a HALLOWEEN movie. His work required someone else to reshoot it. What he shot didn’t work.
And now he’s had 20-plus years of mediocrity to hone his skills to a dull edge, and he’s back, welcomed back into a franchise he left once already in disgrace, and he’s been granted this opportunity to redeem himself, to make the scary, exciting sequel he couldn’t make all those years ago. Talk about a real-life ROCKY story, right?
The snag is that Rosenthal seems to be genuinely devoid of talent or ability or craftsmanship or even basic spatial understanding as a filmmaker. What he’s assembled here from film that was literally tortured through a camera is a nearly unwatchable thriller that manages to contain nothing even remotely resembling a scare.
I take solace in the knowledge that someone had to sit through dailies for this movie. Chances are it was Rosenthal and at least one of the eight producers listed. Seriously. It took eight people working as a closely knit machine (that may never have met each other or had anything to do with actual production) to come up with this astonishing piece of entertainment. Bob Weinstein, Harvey Weinstein, Moustapha Akkad and probable relative Malek Akkad, and Paul Freeman are some of the familiar names here, attached on behalf of this company or that. I hope each and every one of them sat through dailies for this movie and felt their brains bang at the side of their own skulls, desperate to escape the pain. If I found myself in genuine physical discomfort just sitting through the 94 minutes of the film’s finished running time, then it must have been suffering on a truly karmic level to have to sit through every miserable bit of film that was shot to assemble this fucking headache.
If you are fortunate enough to have not seen any ads for the film, let me give you the quickie version: Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks start a website and pick six college students to spend Halloween night in the original Michael Myers house, locked in, each of them wired with a camera as part of an online interactive experience, a la BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. People die. Michael Myers doesn’t.
That’s pretty much it. What you’d expect. But as uninspired an idea as it is to make fun of reality TV at this point (you should have thrown in some cutting-edge lambada jokes while you were at it), it plays far, far worse. John Robie would call out “MIKE FIGGIS!” and punch himself in the face every time Rosenthal cuts to a shot of four video feeds sharing a screen. If you’re going to set up the idea that you’ve got a ton of monitors in a house and you’re watching one of cinema’s most iconic (if ill-used) monsters stalk a group of people... how hard is it to make that film at least visually interesting? It’s even shot in 2.35:1, glorious scope, just like the original. It’s got to have something to recommend about it, right?
God, I wish. But, honestly, no. David Geddes (ERNEST RIDES AGAIN, ERNEST GOES TO SCHOOL, SLAM DUNK ERNEST) shot this film like he was angry at the script.
And the script by Larry Brand...
I just...
...
What am I doing? Am I actually going to give this film the respect of a full review? Am I going to take the time to describe just how blantant and piss poor a ripoff of T2 the opening Jamie Lee Curtis cameo sequence is? Or how ridiculous the explanation is for Michael’s survival after the rather definitive ending of H20 a few years ago? Am I going to go down the list and discuss the cast, one at a time? Am I going to put more effort into the dissection of this film than anyone did regarding the conception of it? If the filmmakers here had so little regard for you, the audience, then why should I waste the time and the column space talking about the particular failings of each department?
Bianca Kajlich, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Sean Patrick Thomas, Billy Kay... you guys have been in real films. You’ve done good work in other places. Were your agents playing pranks on you? You’re all stranded here, and I’m terribly sorry to see it happen. Part of the problem is that Rosenthal seems to have no idea what to do with his actors. Part of the problem is that he asks them to do scenes with Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks.
This is the first time I’ve seen Busta play a lead, and he’s horrific. Some of the film’s very worst moments involve him. In one sequence, he’s sneaking into the house dressed as Michael Myers, and Michael Myers follows him into the house. Have you ever seen the moment in a cartoon or a Three Stooges short where someone’s dressed as a gorilla or some other dangerous animal, and somehow, there’s also a real gorilla or other dangerous animal, and the two of them come face to face? As Busta tells off the real Michael, I imagine audiences will be on their feet, applauding the ingenious absurdist wit on display. He thinks its one of his crew members, and he scolds him and sends him outside. Despite the fact that Michael is an unstoppable killing machine who literally walks through a door without flinching in order to get to Laurie Strode, Michael gets all sheepish when he is yelled at by Busta, and he actually does what he says and leaves, letting Busta get back to scaring the kids.
Towards the end, I’m guessing Busta announced that he would not be going out like a bitch. Instead of following accepted slasher formula and killing everyone except Sara (Kajlich), the young female lead, Busta gets about three big fight sequences where he whups up on Michael. And even when Michael does his worst, he doesn’t kill Busta. He just knocks him out and hurts his neck a little. His fight sequences rival the best work of Jackie Chan in DRUNKEN MASTER 2. He manages to give Michael a run...
... oh, god, even the sarcasm just hurts. This isn’t a funny-bad film. It’s a bad-bad film. Tyra Banks couldn’t act like she was in pain if I lit her on fire. She manages to look surprised that she’s in front of a camera pretty much every time she opens her mouth. I’ve never disliked Banks before, but as far as I was concerned, they couldn’t kill her character off fast enough.
Wait. Maybe that was Brand and Rosenthal’s innovation. Maybe they’ve made a film in which you are rooting for Michael to kill everyone. Maybe this series has now become about a sad, misunderstood little boy who had no choice but to slaughter his family. There’s certainly enough clues dropped this time out, suggestions that Michael was kept in a chair in a closet, abused. Not understanding that the mask is scary because of what it hides, Brand and Rosenthal have tried to humanize Michael. Evil is best when vague, when it’s threatening because it’s unpredictable. The minute you start overexplaining Michael Myers, you rob him of any potency, however tattered, that he still possessed as a character.
I could go on, but I don’t have the heart. Suffice it to say that I hated this film, and I strongly urge you not to see it in the theater. Send the message to Dimension that you want them to STOP... RAPING... THE CORPSE... OF HALLOWEEN... and if you have to see it because you’re a quasi-completionist horror nerd who has seen every other one so far, then wait until it’s free or it’s on cable, or on video. If the film earns nothing in the theater, then I’m hoping the studio will finally admit that they milked this thing to death. They’ll let Michael Myers finally die.
At this point, it would be a kindness.
"Moriarty" out.
