HALLOWEEN RESURRECTION

CONTAINS SPOILERS AND SURPRISE

The most surprising thing is not that I've got some faintly fond memories of this eighth instalment of the Halloween franchise (seventh in the Michael Myers Chronicles if we quite rightly ignore Halloween III: Season Of The Witch) as a formulaic, deeply average but efficient throwback slasher movie. No: the really astonishing thing, some eleven years on from its inclusion at FrightFest 2002, is just how staggeringly terrible it actually is. Despite having a returning director (Rick Rosenthal, from Halloween II), that iconic John Carpenter theme music and even a cameo from Jamie Lee Curtis, it's stuffed with instantly hateful characters and arrant stupidity, never comes within screaming distance of being even mildly scary and ends up headslappingly boring even at a mere 85 minutes.

Six photogenic halfwits are signed up (by Tyra Banks and Busta Rhymes) to star in an internet reality show in which they clump about in Michael Myers' old house, finding planted clues to why he became a homicidal maniac. But wouldn't you just know it: Myers has been living there in the basement the whole time (having finally achieved his life's sole purpose and offed his sister Laurie in the opening reel) and wastes not a second in despatching the intruders, all of whom are wearing little cameras to broadcast the whole idiotic debacle to an audience of people who want to spend Halloween night on the internet watching a bunch of imbeciles stumble around a spooky house.

Halloween was never my favourite franchise: one decent original, a semi-decent sequel and that was about it, yet they eked it out to eight instalments and a worthless reboot. I was always more inclined to Team Jason, though even they lost the plot after six episodes (and their reboot is awful as well). But Halloween Resurrection is rubbish: it never makes you jump, the characters continually do stupid things (whether it's playing lame pranks on one another, making out in the spooky basement, or simply not walking out of the front door at the first sign of real danger) and the final sting that He's Still Not Dead! almost feels like a contractual obligation and contains no more impact than including the hair stylist's name in the closing credits. Back in 2002 I thought it was a tolerable retro teenkill movie that scraped a third star; now it's lucky to get even one.

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