10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
3. It's Pretentiously Full Of Itself
One of the most infuriating things about Halloween: Resurrection is just how much it loves itself.
Remember how in 2017's The Mummy, when Russell Crowe quoted dialogue from James Whale's original Bride of Frankenstein, and the entire audience collectively sighed because it was a sh*t film disgracing a great one by even attempting to reference it? That's how all of Halloween: Resurrection feels.
Director Rick Rosenthal returns to the franchise here for the first time since Halloween II, and while he's apparently forgotten how to craft an even-half-decent sequence of suspense, his ability to reference better films has never been stronger. There are all kinds of nods to the original Halloween, from having Sara introduced listening to a lecture of good-and-evil in a classroom to the unintentionally hysterical moment where Rudy punches through a closet door just like Michael.
But it doesn't stop there. The film also drops surface-level references to things like the work of Carl Jung, the careers of infamous serial killers like John Wayne Gacy, and most painfully of all Michael Powell's Peeping Tom.
Powell's film is an absolute classic about a man who films women and kills them with his camera's tripod, so when Michael follows suit early on in this film, it feels less like an homage and more like an insult. This film never comes close to earning any of these references, no matter how highly it thinks of itself.