The eighth installment in this seemingly deathless series starts with a schematic prologue in a psychiatric hospital, where inmate Laurie (a grim-looking Jamie Lee Curtis, reprising her series role) briefly turns the tables on her brother, the noted serial killer Michael Myers, only to get herself killed. The main plot has to do with a cheapjack Web entrepreneur (Busta Rhymes) who recruits six college students to strap video cameras to their foreheads and rummage through Myers’s decaying childhood home. Their misadventures convey the unmistakable sense that Halloween: Resurrection is about nothing (supposed to be "looking for answers," the kids are really just flaunting their bodies to feed the morbid curiosity of bored Web surfers), and that sense is compounded by director Rick Rosenthal’s dizzying mixture of high-res, low-res, and multi-screen images. Fortunately — or not, depending on your point of view — serial butchery is not long in coming.

Rhymes’s cheerful presence lifts the film somewhat, as does Tyra Banks (though a restless camera sabotages her solo dance routine). But neither their participation nor an agreeable strain of goofiness in the script is enough to redeem the cynicism of this project. (94 minutes)