BEFORE: We're trick-or-treating again tonight, the Chain wants to get that out of the way because there are scarier movies to come, I assume. Tonight we're in the town of Bridge Hollow (rather than, umm, Sherman Oaks?) and we've got another oddly assembled cast of comedy people, musicians and that girl who played a little sister in "Stranger Things". Well, she's a teenager now, as if I didn't already feel very old.
Rob Riggle carries over from "Cursed Friends".
THE PLOT: A teenage girl, who accidentally releases an ancient and michievous spirit on Halloween which causes decorations to come to life and wreak havoc, must team up with the last person she'd want to in order to save her town - her father!
AFTER: Yeah, we're still kind of at the amateur level of scariness here, I'm getting definite "Goosebumps" vibes off of this one, though it's not officially connected to that horror book franchise in any way. But the big attraction in those books and movies is often something inanimate coming to life and in this case, it's Halloween decorations. Which is only a problem if you've just moved to a town that takes decorating super-seriously, like one house has a whole tableau of slow-moving zombies from "The Walking Dead" and another has a whole football team's worth of skeletons with shoulder pads in the the front yard.
For teenager Sydney Gordon, it's almost enough to make her glad her family has moved out of Brooklyn (and to, umm, where, exactly?) where she was never allowed to celebrate Halloween, because being on the science club was more important - and for some reason, she can't do both. Her father is a man of science, a science teacher to be exact, and it takes him way too long, practically the whole movie, for him to believe in magic and demons and inanimate objects coming to life, despite him witnessing it again and again. But the young members of her school's Paranormal Society inform Sydney that her family is moving into a haunted house, and that leads Sydney to go and check out the attic, where she finds a treasure chest with a jack o'lantern-like object in it, which she lights in an act of defiance against her father because she's determined to join in the Halloween fun.
All this really gets her is grounded, with the added bonus of the magic lantern somehow bringing a plastic vampire bat decoration to life, which flies away and spreads the "animagic" to the other decorations in town. When they investigate the origin of the lantern, it brings them to a nursing home where the granddaughter of the woman who died in their house still lives, and that elderly woman tells them about Stingy Jack, who once was seeking a soul from Earth to take his place in the afterlife, but fortunately Madam Hawthorne was a witch or a spell caster of some kind, and she was able to banish him back to the afterlife. Thank God everybody knows not to light his lantern, because then that would be really bad. Whoopsie. The next thing you know, the giant spider decoration on top of the nursing home would be turning into a real live giant spider that would attack everyone.
By some wild coincidence, the school principal turns out to be a collector of occult objects, and just happened to purchase an antique spellbook lately, which, imagine that, happens to contain the banishment spell they need - what ARE the odds against that? They get the spell, however that football team full of skeletons attacks at the exact same time, and the spell book gets kicked into the fireplace. Now they're going to have to conduct a seance to speak to Madam Hawthorne so she can tell them the spell. Well, at least there's a work-around. Thank God nobody's going to put a giant scary jack o'lantern head from the pumpkin carving contest on top of a Stingy Jack statue, man, that would be REALLY bad if that decoration were also to come to life, just like every other decoration in town. Oh, wait...
Yes, this is very far-fetched. Yes, every turn of events is telegraphed quite amateurishly. But it's a movie for KIDS, I think, and kids aren't really masters of subtlety after all, they kind of need everything spelled out for them, even the spells. You can pretty much guess the rest, Stingy Jack re-animates himself in the giant pumpkin-headed statue, he attacks the ONE person that both Sydney and her father care about the most in order to use her soul to take his place in the afterlife, so he can take over the whole world using Halloween decorations. If only the man of science can find it inside himself to believe in magic, to believe in spell casting over science, then we might just have a chance to counter-act all this madness in town.
I JUST recorded all of the "Scary Movie" movies (umm, except the most recent one) and damn, this would have been a great opportunity (OK, maybe not "great", but at least an opportunity) to work them in, with Marlon Wayans carrying over. The Wayans Brothers started that franchise and then lost it for a while, but then got it back, and there IS a through-line through all those movies. However, I'm committed to the "Final Destination" films this year, so I just can't work those in this Movie Year. I'll have to keep them on the list and try to get to them in a future Shocktober, the chain has other plans and I have to let them happen.
Directed by Jeff Wadlow (director of "True Memoirs of an International Assassin" and "Fantasy Island")
Also starring Marlon Wayans (last seen in "Respect"), Priah Ferguson (last seen in "The Oath"), Kelly Rowland (last seen in "Think Like a Man"), John Michael Higgins (last seen in "Spinal Tap II: The End Continues"), Lauren Lapkus (last seen in "The Out-Laws"), Nia Vardalos (last seen in "My Big Fat Greek Wedding 3"), Abi Monterey, Holly J. Barrett, Myles Perez, Helen Slayton-Hughes (last seen in "Moxie"), Dougie Dawson, Pfeiffer Yaeger, William Finn Carmichael, Jonathan Kite, Douglas Hodge (last seen in "G20"), Kay Hall, David A. Cooper (last seen in "J. Edgar"), Dave Sheridan (last seen in "Sex Drive"), Keil Oakley Zepernick, Nickolas Wolf (last seen in "Landscape with Invisible Hand"), Mark Steger (last seen in "Rebel Moon - Part One: A Child of Fire"), Gordon Tarpley (also carrying over from "Cursed Friends"), Steven I. Dillard (last seen in "They Cloned Tyrone"), Phoenix Jd Gabe, Ralphael Lester, BobbyD Souris, Chris Williams (also last seen in "Respect"), Sam Zheng (last seen in "Jerry & Marge Go Large")
RATING: 5 out of 10 sugar-free and dairy-free and gluten-free bakery treats.
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