Welcome, dear readers, to Substream’s 31 Days of Halloween. While every holiday captures the hearts and minds of the Substream staff, Halloween holds an especially important place in our hearts. Now that we’ve entered the month of October, it’s time for us to share our love for this holiday with you.
Every single day in October, our collection of spooky staff writers and ghoulish guest contributors will walk you through a horror or Halloween-themed movie they adore. The goal is to both celebrate the titans and icons of the season while also introducing you to new films and scares to fill your autumn nights. Lock your doors, check under your bed, and settle in as you join Substream for our 31 Days of Halloween.
Day 31: Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
All you need to know about Halloween: Resurrection is that it ends with two scenes of Busta Rhymes kicking Michael Myers’ ass. In the first, Busta performs a series of kung-fu kicks, launching the iconic slasher villain through a window, into an extension cable noose. In the second, the rapper smacks a shovel against Michael’s chest, then electrocutes him in the dick with…some kind of electrical plug? Or something?
It doesn’t matter. The plot of this movie doesn’t matter. The above paragraph where I described the ending of Halloween: Resurrection hardly counts as a spoiler, because Halloween: Resurrection hardly has a plot. Generously, this movie is two shorter movies stitched together into a confusing film that attempts to re-open the Halloween franchise after the conclusion of Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later.
Watching Halloween: Resurrection is an uncanny experience. The film feels unfinished and pointless; it’s never scary because the basis is so shaky. The film opens with a retcon of H20, as a flashback reveals that Michael Myers is still alive. Apparently, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) killed the wrong man at the end of the last film. Laurie, who has been admitted to a sanitarium, doesn’t speak and hordes her meds, waiting for Myers to return. Of course, on Halloween, he breaks in, kills some guards, and attacks Laurie, killing her after a brief struggle on the rooftop. Then, with one-third of the movie already accounted for, we flash forward to a year later, where college students Bill, Donna, Jen, Jim, Rudy, and Sara are selected to appear on a live-streaming reality show produced by Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes) and Nora Winston (Tyra Banks). The show takes place in the quarantined childhood home of Michael Myers, and as you probably expected, trouble finds them when Michael shows up.
There wasn’t a point during my entire viewing of the film where I simultaneously understood what was happening in the film, why it was happening, how far into the film I had already watched, and why the entire setting, cast of characters, and plot changed after the first twenty minutes. I kept wondering when Jamie Lee Curtis would return, seeing as she features prominently on the movie poster and died in a seemingly-unrelated scene fifteen minutes in (Spoiler: She never did.) At times, watching the movie hurt my eyes, as far too many of the shots are seen through the eyes of the students’ sub-standard-definition, extremely-early-aughts webcams. I never felt like the screenwriters had a real grasp on each character’s personality, dropping below even the typical level of under-written character in horror movies.
The biggest bummer about Halloween: Resurrection is that it’s never quite as fun as it could be. Its premise—“a bunch of students film an online reality show in Michael Myers’ childhood home, Michael returns, Busta Rhymes is present”—never delivers on its obviously goofy premise. In different hands, this film could have been a cult classic. In its final state, unfortunately, the film is little more than a disappointing series of boring shots until the end, at which point Busta Rhymes kicks Michael Myers’ ass and electrocutes his dick.
