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Snoozy Slasher

Rating: N


come home from halloween: Resurrection, and there’s Jamie Lee Curtis hawking cellphones on the TV. Is there any star of her magnitude who’s had such an apparently haphazard career? She’s done voice work and documentary appearances around the 20th anniversary of Halloween, and this is her 10th feature film role since True Lies. I doubt if many people could name more than three of those nine other films.

I could, if so inclined, use this as an opportunity to attack the shortage of good roles for actresses over 40, but Curtis seems remarkably indifferent to “good career choices.” Virus? Daddy And Them? Homegrown? In Drowning Mona she’s actually quite good, but still does a lot of “hit your mark, say your lines, cash the cheque” work.

Curtis completists will want to see Halloween: Resurrection but should be forewarned that the Curtis portion serves more or less as a 25-minute prologue, and the rest of the film is about a bunch of college students who sign up to be on a Web broadcast that involves staying in the Michael Myers house over Halloween night.

Busta Rhymes and Sean Patrick Thomas from Save The Last Dance are on hand to say “damn” and “motherfucker” while white people get impaled by the 50-ish serial killer, who’s apparently living in a cave under the gigantic basement of the house.

What’s really sad about this isn’t the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s that Rick Rosenthal is directing.

Rosenthal made his directorial debut two decades ago on Halloween II. In the interim, he’s made a couple of good pictures, notably Bad Boys with Sean Penn and American Dreamer with Jobeth Williams, and he’s done a lot of fairly serious television. Here, he’s back at his old gig, figuring out how to light stabbings one more time. It’s the sort of career move that suggests the director should seriously consider porn.

After Scream, is there still a market for dead-teenager movies? It’s hard to imagine. On the other hand, Anchor Bay video has a three-disc deluxe boxed set of Sleepaway Camp 1-3, one of the least distinguished Friday The 13th rip-offs, coming out next month.

Perhaps the genre is unkillable.johnh@nowtoronto.com

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