Halloween: Resurrection opens today, but what we really want to know is, when was the crucifixion? Because, believe it or not, this is the eighth installment of the Halloween series, which wore out its welcome in 1978 right about when the credits started rolling at the end of the original.
Churn out a couple more of these hopelessly outdated slasher flicks and they'll be on par with the even more stale Friday The 13th movies, which reached a mindboggling 10 chapters with this year's release of Jason X.
The producers of the unscary Halloween: Resurrection try to bring a sliver of relevance back to the "franchise" by making the Internet a major part of the plot.
Six young, hip and fearless college students are selected to spend the night in the abandoned house where masked psychopath Michael Myers was raised. In order to simulcast this little adventure on the Web, every participant wears a mini-camera while exploring the house. Too bad for them -- and especially for us -- that Michael is still alive, still lives in the house, and still likes to carve up young, horny people like jack-o-lanterns.
GRATUITOUS SEX
Before all of this, though, there's a pointless 15-minute opening sequence in which a slumming Jamie Lee Curtis -- the original Halloween scream queen -- has a final showdown with Michael at the mental institution in which she's incarcerated.
The movie then switches jarringly to its annoying, unremarkable cast of twentysomethings and their night in the haunted house of recycled horror cliches.
Tick 'em off as we go: The heroine is the virginal girl (Bianca Kajlich) who's more frightened than the others; another girl flashes her breasts, has gratuitous sex and is promptly killed off; and although it's the last thing any sane person would do, characters wander alone into dark rooms or down into the decrepit cellar.
Much of the cast is stiff or just plain bad. Heavy-lidded rapper Busta Rhymes, who plays the Internet guru who sets up the Webcast, is either the worst actor ever to appear in a movie, or a comic genius.
From his scenes watching a Bruce Lee movie in a motel to his titanic kung-fu battle with Michael Myers, you can decide for yourself whether Rhymes is trying to milk some scenes for laughs, or just failing really badly to play it straight.
Halloween: Resurrection proves it's pretty easy these days to make a cheapo horror flick: Get a hack director, throw together a script on the fly, toss in lots of blood and guts and release the thing under a recognizable brand name.
Resurrecting our interest in it, however, is a whole other story.
(This film is rated R)
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