As the film opens, it's been four years since Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) ended the threat of her infamous masked serial killer brother by decapitating him with a fire axe at the conclusion of "Halloween Twenty Years Later (H20)." The only problem is that the masked man Laurie beheaded wasn't Michael at it. It was, rather, a paramedic who Michael traded clothes with after crushing his larynx and then left in the school-dining hall for the other medics to take away.

As if she hadn't been through enough since that fateful night in Haddonfield 24 years ago, Laurie has been driven mad by the accidental murder and is, as the film opens, in a mental institution herself. And where did Michael go? Home, of course, to his childhood house in Haddonfield which hasn't been occupied since the murder of his first sister in 1963. But as Halloween night approaches, he isn't going to be alone. A pair of Internet entertainment producers (Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks) have leased the ramshackle, boarded up house and offered scholarships to six Haddonfield University students if they'll stay in the Myer's house on Halloween night in the hopes that Internet viewers will log on to watch them investigate the supposed home base of pure evil. To assure that his on-line audience gets their money's worth, Rymes and Banks have salted the house with Mikey's childhood things, rigged every room in the house with a camera and wired each of the college students with cameras as well. As the coup de gras complete, Rhymes even dons his own Michael Myers costume to add a few scares. I mean, what the heck? It's all about the ratings, right?

Of course he doesn't know that Michael has been hanging out in a hidden subterranean basement living on rats for the past 24 years. So you can use your imagination to figure out what goes on when the cameras go on-line and the doors are shut and locked. But you can't wander into a bear cave and then complain about the bears, can you?

Veteran "Halloween" director Rick Rosenthal brings his old dog out of retirement without teaching him a lot of new tricks. In fact, every device employed in every horror movie you've seen is used, including those put into play in former "Halloween" flicks. For example, when Michael spears the camera tech with his own tripod, Banks is too busy making herself a drink to notice the vicious murder on a whole bank of monitors behind her just like the bumbling security guard in "Halloween II" did when Michael lumbered into the Haddonfield clinic. As was the case with "Halloween 5" and "Curse of Michael Myers," the final girl (that's the trade name for the survivor) of the previous movie is the first victim of the current one. And, of course, nobody believes that anything is really going on, including the Internet audience watching the whole thing, even after the murders begin. The only new device employed in "Resurrection" is the fact that the final girl in this one has a chat-room buddy who is watching the show and is able to tell her where Michael is via a portable note pad she just happened to have brought along with her. Otherwise, the participants in the Myers house look pretty much like the guests in "The House on Haunted Hill" remake from a couple of years ago. There's the ditzy blonde who wants to be a star, the cynical philosophy student, the couple who just wants to find a place to get it on, and the black culinary student who only thinks in terms of kitchens and food. It's too bad his prowess with ginsu knives isn't a little better, since the cook-thing worked so well for LL Cool J in "Deep Blue Sea" (who could forget his escape from the genetically altered shark in an oven?) and, of course, for Steven Segall in "Under Siege" and it's sequel "Dark Territory" (remember the great line from that one? -- "Nobody beats me in the kitchen...").

Likewise, the murders are pretty typical too. One guy gets his head crushed. One girl gets impaled on a wall, and the would-be starlet gets beheaded (say, didn't we already see that in "House on Haunted Hill"?) but everybody else just gets sliced and diced. Michael, of course, pops up where he's least expected, and he comes back an appropriate number of times when you think he's had it. Gone are all the lame attempts to explain why he goes on a rampage on Halloween night or why he's indestructible, and, as with "H20," gone are the story lines of "Halloween 4, 5 and 6". What's left is sort of like a tour through a virtual haunted house without a joystick. Let's run from the boogeyman. Bonus points if you get away.

"Halloween Resurrection" is the eighth film in the series, which began in 1978 with John Carpenter's original shocker about a baby-sitter being stalked by a masked killer. The film, which is now considered a classic by fans and critics alike, was the first of the so-called "slasher" style horror movies, and it ushered in the first of the "new age" monsters who would join Jason Voorhees ("Friday the 13th"), Freddy Kruger ("A Nightmare on Elm Street") and Ghost Face ("Scream") to out lumber Frankenstein, out stalk the Wolfman and leave pools of blood that would make Dracula envious to become the reigning champs of contemporary nightmares. And as long as the fans keep screaming and shelling out the bucks at the box office, you know they'll keep coming back.