Halloween Resurrection is also a terrible film.

Really, just awful. But like my recent look at H20, I’m not going to provide a critique the overall film, but rather a single portion of it that I find indicative of the complete product.

Once again, this section comes from the beginning of the film, and I believe that it proves, rather conclusively, that the filmmakers not only don’t understand Michael Myers, the character, but that they don’t know how any element of anything works.

Let’s start with the heavy lifting that they had to do at the beginning of the movie, explaining how Michael Myers managed to bounce back from the beheading that closed out the last film.

It’s not actually that big of a leap to make – I distinctly remember walking out of H20 on opening night, spitballing about how to bring Michael back. The first thing we came up with? That he smacked a janitor over the head, switched outfits with him, taped his mouth shut, and then disappeared into the night. We laughed about what a copout that would have been, and hoped that they’d work out something better by the time the next movie came around.

So it was kind of weird, three years later, seeing essentially the scene we’d imagined play out, somehow even stupider in real life than when we’d dismissed it.

To be fair, they did a remarkably good job recreating Michael’s repose from H20, placing him on a broken table, with a knife in his right hand.

See? Not a bad job there, guys. But there’s a problem with your choice of victims. Michael knocks out and half-strangles the absolute first paramedic that happens across his body. How do we know he’s the first? Because the knife is still in his hand. The paramedic makes it his first priority to remove it, before even checking for vital signs.

Which means Michael’s vital signs were never checked. And why not? With that paramedic mysteriously disappearing, no one certified the other paramedic as dead, so how did he end up in a morgue wagon? Someone had to check the body at some point, and how did that someone miss both a pulse and the fact that the body was clearly breathing? I don’t doubt that Michael Myers has the ability to slow his respiration to the point that it’s undetectable – but why would a knocked-out paramedic display the same symptoms?

So the whole accidental-decapitation explanation doesn’t make a lick of sense. Ah, if the stupidity only ended there, we might have been able to write it off as a necessary evil to bring the character back and get the plot rolling once more.

But that was just the beginning of the idiocy. Now we fast-forward three years, and find Jamie Lee Curtis languishing in an asylum, comatose from the guilt of that accidental beheading. Of course that’s all just a trick, and she’s not comatose at all, just patiently awaiting the arrival of Michael Myers at her bedside.

He arrives at the asylum one night, sneaking into the facility in an unusually preposterous fashion. How strange is it? This is the tubby guy who wanders around the yard, apparently unsupervised, talking about serial killers. Note his pajamas and general physique.

His whole thing is knowing facts about serial killers. When he’s wearing the clown mask (interestingly it’s pretty close to the mask used last time to sub in for Michael’s childhood costume) he’s thinking about John Wayne Gacy, and reports that Gacy killed 33 people and gives his correct birth and death dates. So this is a guy who knows his stuff, right? Okay, remember that. It’s going to be important later.

After escorting tubby to his room the security guards see Michael Myers on the video cameras, and make the assumption that tubby must have walked out again. Because it’s possible to mistake a stocky, hunched mental patient in pajamas for a tall, lean man with excellent posture wearing a boiler suit.

Of course, these are the same guards who didn’t find it worth mentioning that the chain securing the outer gate had been shattered, so maybe they were both terminally ill, and hoping to get killed on the job so that their life insurance would pay out double.

The security guards are quickly dispatched, and Michael comes for Jamie. He hasn’t gotten any smarter since the last time, though, falling for the old ‘pillows arranged in the crude form of a person’ thing. Jamie then leads him in a chase up to the roof and manages to trick him into standing on the exact place on the roof where she’d left a loop of rope attached to a winch.

Michael is hoisted up into the air by one leg where he dangles helplessly, because a man who’s perfectly capable of raising and lowering his entire body weight with a single arm can’t manage even one inverted situp to snag the rope and pull himself free.

This leaves Jamie free to pick up Michael’s dropped knife and start cutting through the rope – the only thing that’s keeping him from plummeting to his… um, yeah, I’m not exactly sure why she thinks dropping him off the roof is going to kill him. Yes, it’s four stories, but remember when he got shot six times and fell off a house? Or the time he was set on fire and kind of wandered around for five minutes? How are either of those less deadly then falling four stories?

She doesn’t manage to pull the trigger, anyways – as she’s cutting the rope Michael holds his ears:

Seriously? That’s his weakness? Huh. I never would have guessed. Anyhoo, Jamie freaks out because this action slightly resembles something the paramedic did before he was beheaded.

So she decides that she has to know for sure that it’s Michael under the mask, by walking over to him and pulling the mask off herself.

Um… why?

Let’s say that walking within arm’s reach of a possible Michael Myers isn’t a suicidally stupid idea, I mean, if he wants to prove who he is under there, why can’t he just pull the mask off himself? More importantly, though, what’s pulling off the mask possibly going to prove? You don’t know what Michael Myers looks like! Yes, you saw him once, twenty years ago, for about three seconds. You can’t possibly have the slightest idea what he’d look like under that mask, so why bother taking it off?

More to the point, who cares whether it’s actually Michael Myers under there? Let’s not forget that he came to the asylum to kill you. Remember when he walked through that door to get you? Not doorway. Door.

So even if it’s not him (which you could never know definitively without a blood test, anyhow), why not kill the guy?

Despite all of these good reasons to just cut the rope Jamie decides to walk over to Michael, giving him a perfectly good chance to murder her, which he does.

That’s the first eleven minutes of the movie, and there’s not a single moment of it that isn’t idiotic. And yet the stupidest part is yet to come.

But it can wait until next time.