It's always amusing these days trying to find actual horror in horror movies. It's even funnier watching in desperation how aging properties claw for relevance in a time when Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, and here, Michael Myers all seem, well, quaint. Halloween: Resurrection does this by grasping on to current trends in pathetic fashion. It is actually two movies, a short, tacked on coda to Halloween: H2O, and then the actual movie, which borrows elements from The Blair Witch Project, The Haunting, CBS's Big Brother and reality shows in general, and other fads that will soon die and date the movie once is disappears from theaters. The fact that combined, the two parts of Halloween: Resurrection come to less than ninety minutes shows how much the film is lacking in story and everything else. The first twenty minutes takes place at the Grace Anderson Sanitarium, where patient Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, The Tailor of Panama, Drowning Mona) lies in a vegetative state after the events in the last movie.

The second part is completely unrelated to the first. It takes place at the childhood house of Strode and her brother, Michael Myers (Brad Loree, American Outlaws, Hardball). Producer Freddie Harris (Busta Rhymes, Finding Forrester, Shaft) and his assistant Nora (Tyra Banks, Coyote Ugly, Love and Basketball) are producing a show for Dangertainment where six young people will stay the night in the house, exploring and doing whatever else (usually this means sex, drugs, and alcohol). Each participant will get a scholarship and must wear cameras. The house has cameras in every room so the entire affair can broadcast live over the Internet. Harris has rigged the house for some additional scares, without the knowledge of the participants. The people in the house are mousy, shy, Sara (Bianca Kajlich, Bring It On, 10 Things I Hate About You), her friend the publicity hungry Jenna (Katee Sackhoff, My First Mister), their friend and aspiring chef Rudy (Sean Patrick Thomas, Save the Last Dance, Dracula 2000), music major and horny Jim (Luke Kirby, Lost and Delirious, Give Me Your Soul...), also horny Bill (Thomas Ian Nichols, American Pie 2, Cutaway), and random girl Donna (Daisy McCrackin, Peak Experience, 3000 Miles to Graceland).

One of the amusing elements of most horror films is trying to guess who survives. The screenplay by Larry Brand (Dial 9 for Love, The Right Temptation) and Sean Hood (The Darklings) is blatantly obvious about one survivor, rendering this little game moot. The premise of Dangertainment is thin, even after Harris decides to throw in his own fun, and even the characters know it. They wander around the house for a while, bored, before Michael Myers appears and begins his slaughter in earnest. Meanwhile, Myles (Ryan Merriman, The Deep End of the Ocean, Just Looking), a friend of Sara's, is watching over the Internet at a Halloween party. Lucky for her they can keep in contact with a PDA. Halloween: Resurrection is just as bad as any other standard horror movie these days. What makes this particular film worse is that it cannot even sustain itself for the length of a normal movie. The Curtis scenes seem there only to remind people that yes, this is a movie in the franchise. Replace Myers with any other serial killer and hey, new movie! Director Rick Rosenthal (Just A Little Harmless Sex, Devlin) does nothing original to in any way distinguish this movie from the hordes of other, similar movies out there.