Every once in a while, I feel bad about these articles. I feel certain I’m trampling on Millennial feelings. Not to mention the tourism industry of a small town in Oregon, in this case. St. Helens, Oregon, is still making bank on this after all these years. Actually, I know someone personally who’s made money from this by working as a vendor at Halloweentown events. So I feel bad for how much I really did not like this movie.
Marnie Piper (Kimberly J. Brown) loves Halloween and always has. However, her mother, Gwen (Judith Hoag), does not. She doesn’t let the kids dress up or go trick-or-treating or to parties or in any way celebrate, despite having met the kids’ father at a Halloween party many years before. Her son, Dylan (J. Paul Zimmerman), is fine with this, because he’s an obnoxious little nerdlinger. However, Marnie and Sophie (Emily Roeske) are disappointed. On Marnie’s thirteenth Halloween, her grandmother, Aggie Cromwell (Debbie Reynolds, of all people), shows up to convince Gwen to let Marnie train, because if she doesn’t begin training that day, she’ll lose her powers.
But that aspect of the plot about ninety percent goes out the window when Aggie returns to Halloweentown and the kids follow her. It turns out the town is under the evil influence of Not Yet Revealed But It’s Not A Surprise. It will take the power of the Cromwell witches to defeat it, but Gwen shows up to town to take the kids back home. Her ex-boyfriend, Kalabar (Robin Thomas), is now the mayor of Halloweentown, and she asks him to help get her and the kids back home, but that’s not his plan.
Okay, did they spend so much of the budget on Debbie Reynolds—who apparently introduced herself to the child actors as “Princess Leia’s mom” in a move that wouldn’t surprise Carrie Fisher a lick—that they couldn’t afford, like, good makeup? Or was it deliberately cartoony? Early in the movie, Aggie gives the kids a book about Halloweentown, and I was annoyed by how badly illustrated it was, but it was just a lead-in for how fake the makeup on all the characters in Halloweentown looked. I couldn’t even tell what kind of monster a lot of them were supposed to be.
And apparently the choices are “cool person who likes Halloween” and “insufferable little twerp.” When Dylan suggests a holiday for Marnie to obsess over instead, he suggests Arbor Day. Not, you know, Christmas. Or even Thanksgiving or the Fourth of July. Freaking Arbor Day. I won’t deny having been something of a nerd myself as a child—you’re all shocked, I know—and I was able to be stuffed with useless facts and still, like, enjoy fantasy. And not rain on other people’s parades, mostly, even though that is technically what I’m doing here I guess.
But it’s not even “oh, magic is so fake.” It’s “my Gods this script was bad” and “Jesus Mark Mothersbaugh was phoning it in on this score.” I love a good fantasy movie, and folks this was not it. There was a scanty effort at world-building, but mostly just handwaving into “so we live here because mortals have their own view of what we’re supposed to be like.” What are they like? Humans from the 1950s. There’s a ghost doing one of those steam bath things that I’m not sure are actually in gyms anymore because they’re personal saunas.
Weirdly, what struck me about this movie was that there’s several issues here that are relevant today that are kind of glossed over by the plot. The villain turns out to be an incel who’s mad because he got dumped and is going to destroy the world over it, somehow. And the grandmother is trying to exercise her rights over the grandkids, because she wants to control their future against the mother’s wishes. And like, the mom is trying to control the kids, but they’re still minors. She’s legally allowed to.
I do find it annoying that Marnie will lose her powers forever if she’s not in training by the time she’s thirteen. That’s too young to shape the entire path of your future. It’s honestly what bothers me about several other works—I get that children like seeing other children doing things, but even Kiki’s literally thirteen when she has to leave home and start her own path as a witch. Like, maybe we let them finish puberty before everything in their life is determined for them?
Unlike Dylan, I’m not telling you that you’re wrong for liking what you like. You do you. It’s fine, and there’s nothing wrong with that. You’re allowed to have your tastes. I really did not like this movie, but my daughter did. She only half-watched it, but she said she thought it was good, so that’s fine for her. I just don’t get it. The music was probably the worst I’ve ever heard from Mothersbaugh. Reynolds was overacting to hell and gone. The makeup was bad. The sets were mediocre. The costumes . . . .
The costumes annoyed me as a Pagan, honestly. This is one of my irritated places. When Aggie gives Marnie a costume, Marnie says excitedly, “I’m a Wiccan!” Which leaving aside that it’s a religion, not a costume, honey, no, you aren’t. You’re someone’s bohemian thrift store idea of what modern witches dress like. The Craft is more accurate to how Pagans I’ve known dress when they’re dressing up. Many Pagans, though not all, self-identify as witches, but that doesn’t mean our religion is your Halloween witch. If they hadn’t had that one line, I wouldn’t have connected it. But they did, and I’m annoyed.
I did like that most of the mortals in the movie were fairly ordinary-looking. This sounds like an insult, I suspect, but I mean it. Roeske was cute but not, like, incredibly adorable. Just cute in the sense that kids her age generally are. Zimmerman was your typical Nerdy Younger Brother character; I don’t know if he needed the glasses or not, but they were by-Gods going to have him wear them. Brown looked fairly similar to my own kids, honestly. Normal. And they didn’t have to suffer for hours in the makeup chair like most of the rest of the cast, so that was lucky for them.
So I don’t know. It’s the first screen appearance of Kenneth Choi, admittedly in an utterly insufferable role as an Elvis-impersonating skeletal figure of some sort who sells brooms. It’s on Disney+, if you care, and I’m quite glad it is because I didn’t have to spend money on it. It’s not the worst movie I’ve seen. It’s not even the worst Millennial-beloved Halloween-themed movie I’ve seen for this column. And I’m told the sequels are worse, so thank Gods I don’t have to watch them. But really, I’m going to stick to Blackbeard’s Ghost in the future.