By now a sense of ennui has well and truly set into the Halloween series. In a bid for some kind of novelty, this entry sees the series looking around and taking on board ideas from its contemporaries. It borrows from The Blair Witch Project (1999) and its novel use of handheld video camera (something that proves quite excruciating on the eyes on the big screen in the constant cutting back and forward between film stock and blown up, handheld video). It also manages to wind in the fascination with the modern telecommunications revolution, with a number of plot devices dependent on webcams, e-mail relationships, even a climactic rescue involving messages transmitted by palmpilot. It also borrows from Scream (1996) and its fad for deconstructed slasher movies, writing in a critical theorist as a character and making some intriguing speculations at the outset about how Michael is representative of a Jungian ‘shadow’. There a number of references to other films – the asylum scenes and Jamie Lee Curtis’s character are strongly reminiscent of the similar scenes and Linda Hamilton’s transformation in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), while Michael’s murder with a camera tripod has clearly been borrowed from Peeping Tom (1960). Although, the greatest ingenuity that the film offers is its premise that is a take on the current 00’s fad for reality tv shows – Survivor, Big Brother, Temptation Island et al – and the novel winding in of this into a slasher film.

But for all its employment of handheld camerawork, for all its nod toward slasher movie deconstructions, Halloween: Resurrection is still the same old Halloween sequel formula. Other than a few scenes with Michael sneaking up on people being sent across the web, the reality tv scenario fails to be used in any novel way; and for all the attempt to analyse Michael in terms of critical/psychological theory and the idea of a broadcast that sets out to explain what made him who he is, none of these questions are ever dwelt upon again beyond their initial mention, let alone answered. Rick Rosenthal fails to do anything other than develop rudimentary by-the-book scare and gore tactics. The film’s eeriest moment is one where we see two Michael’s, one real, one fake, following each other through the house – but this is the only moment the film comes near approximating anything of the suspense that John Carpenter did in the original. Rosenthal fails to even play the real horrors vs faked tv show set-ups off each other in any interesting way. Busta Rhymes gives a totally overacted performance – his anti-media remonstration that closes the film is just ludicrous posturing that one cannot take the slightest bit seriously. [A much more successful integration of the reality tv concept into a horror movie could be found in the same year’s excellent My Little Eye (2002)].

The other Halloween films are:– Halloween II (1981), Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5 (1989), Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) and Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998). Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) was made as part of the series but is unrelated to the Michael Meyers/Myers saga. Halloween (2007) was a remake of the original film, which in turn has produced a sequel with Halloween II (2009).