Halloweentown (1998)

This weeks Disney Week x Spooky Season collab was a bit of a difficult choice to be honest! But mostly because I have so many to choose from on my watchlist! However I've made my decision and we are going to watch Halloweentown from 1998 this week; the first instalment in the Halloweentown movie series, ironically... and only the fourth Disney Channel Original Movie to ever air! The movie focuses on 13 year old Marnie travelling to Halloweentown and discovering she is a witch. Also by some odd coincidence it just so happens to be 25 years + 1 day to the date that it originally aired on Disney Channel which I genuinely did not plan going into this... I've heard good things about this movie. It's reviewed fairly well, seems to be spoken of positively by Disney fans and is generally considered to be a good movie, making it immediately out of place on this blog... but in the spirit of working my way through some of the more obscure DCOM's it finds it's way onto my watchlist as one of those movies that has just sort of gotten lost in ether that is the vast, unquantifiable Disney movie output and I'm kind of intrigued to see why, especially given that it spawned a further 3 sequels after it's initial release. I gave it alot of thought and very nearly wanted to cover Z-O-M-B-I-E-S 2 after err... kind of enjoying... the original quite a bit but uh no. I've made my decision. We are doing Halloweentown.

After throwing a tantrum over not being allowed to go out trick or treating on Halloween, Marnie (Kimberly J. Brown) and her brother Dylan (Joey Zimmerman) and sister Sophie (Emily Roeske) are visited at home by their estranged and slightly eccentric Grandma Aggie (Debbie Reynolds). Grandma proceeds to fill the children's heads with wonderful stories of witches, and wizards and a place called Halloweentown before Mother Gwen (Judith Hoag) intervenes and quickly ushers Grandma away, worried that she'll say too much and spoil a secret she's been keeping from the children for a very long time... Desperate for the children to grow up having a normal life, Gwen and Grandma Aggie argue over Marnie's fate, with her 13th year supposed to be the year she completes her witches training, with Marnie and the children unaware of their true powers. Grandma Aggie reveals that something strange is happening in Halloweentown and she needs Gwen's help to fight it, but Gwen is having none of it. Instead so focused on her and the kids growing up and having a normal life. However unbeknownst to the pair, Marnie has been listening in on the whole thing and desperate to learn more, her, Sophie and Dylan sneak onboard the magical bus that collects Grandma from right outside their house.  After they get separated from Grandma when they arrive in Halloweentown, they get picked up by a skeleton taxi driver who warns them to avoid some of the characters in town before dropping them off at Grandma Aggie's massive house. Grandma is surprisingly nonchalant about the kids just rocking up at her gaff without their mother... but after they talk her into letting them help her figure out what's happening with "the bad thing"; an odd darkness that's creeping into Halloweentown she agrees to letting the kids stay in town for a little while and assist her in her errands to revive Merlin's Talisman, which Aggie believes will help them destroy the darkness. Out on their errands they run into the Mayor: Kalabar (Robin Thomas) who, after Aggie explains that she has seen more unsettling things happen in town, asks Aggie and the kids to not get involved and leave it to him. And after Marnie is out broom shopping, they bump into the town resident douchebag: Luke (Phillip Van Dyke) who low-key tries to hit on Marnie but gets knocked back and scuttles off in a huff... not uh... literally... he's human. However all the fun they are having swiftly comes to an end when Gwen realises her kids have gone missing and turns up in Halloweentown to drag them back to reality. After her and Grandma argue a bit about what is right for Marnie and what isn't, she pulls them away and after first attempting to get the bus back to the mortal world, decides to pay a visit to Mayor Kalabar to see if he can help them get home. Marnie just whinging and backchating the whole time whilst she does. When they arrive, it appears Mayor Kalabar and Gwen maybe have some history, but Kalabar gets called away before he can help the group out meaning they are stuck in town at least for the moment. But when the girls spot Aggie being lead somewhere by Luke, they decide to chase after and help her despite their mothers protestations. Luke leads Aggie to the shut down cinema which appears to contain all the townspeople that have been changing and then going missing. They are transfixed with some kind of weird vortex thing on the big screen. From the screen emerges a hooded demon who has seemingly been casting spells on the townspeople and collecting them in the cinema in preparation to use them as his own personal army. He demands Aggie hand over the Talisman and when she refuses he starts to attack her, just as Marnie and the others burst in the cinema. When Gwen rushes to save Aggie, she is hit by one the demon's spells putting her to sleep and unde his control. When Aggie cries out, distracted, she too is hit with same spell. Marnie and the kids run away in fear, and flooding the cinema with daylight, temporarily vanquish the demon back into the vortex. Outside Marnie hatches a plan to collect the ingredients needed to relight Merlin's Talisman and after pep talking her brother and sister into helping her, they set out around Halloweentown to collect the items. They immediately make their way to the werewolf barbers and after Marnie distracts the barber, Dylan uses some clippers to steal a bit of his fur. Then next stop: a gym and with it: a sauna room to steal the sweat of a ghost (look, just go with it). Sophie distracts him by pretending to be a ghost whilst Marnie nabs a bead of his sweat. Then a quick impromptu visit to the town dentist to steal a vampire's fang. After a near miss with the skeleton taxi driver from earlier who now appears to be on the bad side of things, the trio race back to the Grandma's house and succeed in lighting up the Talisman. They return to the cinema but can't really get the Talisman to do much of anything until Marnie has an idea to install it in the huge pumpkin jack-o-lantern in the town square. Marnie is just about to enter the huge pumpkin when Luke stops her, warning her that it's a trap and that he was told to just get the Talisman and that Aggie wouldn't come to harm. As they are talking, dark clouds sweep across Halloweentown and the demon appears in front of the town hall, promising to the rest of the townsfolk that there time to return to the mortal world has arrived and that their exile from it is over. The demon reveals himself to be Kalabar which... yeah Disney+ ruined for me so I already knew that one... Kalabar calls out to the rest of the town to find and stop Marnie from ruining their plan and when he spots her heading towards the lantern he jumps down and attacks, incapacitating Marnie. But it transpires to be Luke wearing her cloak, and when he pulls back the hood and realises, he spots the real Marnie opening up the jack-o-lantern and dropping the Talisman inside. As a massive glow engulfs the entire town, Kalabar's magic is broken and the characters in the cinema all awake and return to normal. Grandma Aggie and Gwen rush into the town square and are reunited with the kids where Kalabar reveals he planned the whole thing because he felt spurned in his affection for Gwen... Fair enough... and isn't quite finished with his plan just yet, but after convincing Dylan that he too can be a warlock, the family come together and their power combined is enough to banish Kalabar to imprisonment within the Talisman.

Oooh I don't know about this one you know. I mean, it was OK but I did struggle with it quite a bit. I've watched a bunch of these DCOM's now but this is the first time I've watched one where I really felt like it was too childish. I mean they've all been designed and produced in order to cater to a younger audience, standard, but this is the first one I've watched that I felt really crossed that line between being accessible by a more mature audience and being straight up: this is for children. This... this was for children. 100%. So I guess, maybe I'm biased by that as a result but yeah, I wasn't as into this one as maybe some of the others I've watched.

I struggled a bit with Marnie as a character. I found her quite annoying and difficult really. The way she outright speaks back to her mother is just not portraying a good role model for younger children... yeah guess that's the adult in me... and she's often quite selfish and self-important. The movie never really demonstrates her attitude as being wrong. If anything she's rewarded for it and although she does kind of U-turn in the 3rd act when she brings her siblings together to help her, by this point, the movie has well and truly established her character. Maybe I'd feel different if I was younger? But for me I found her character is portrayed in a quite a negative stereotype and a bit of a bad example to children.

Similarly the rest of the characters are kind of diluted down to just fit their assigned stereotype and slot in around wherever they have to fit. Everything is very over simplistic and there's not much in the way of development. We get a bit of character development with Gwen when we find out why she has reservations about her kids following the same path she did, and wanting them to grow up human, but everything else kind of isn't elaborated on. Save for some rushed exposition towards the end. It's fine to keep it simple to not alienate your target audience I guess but a little bit of character development would have been nice to at least build why we should cheer for the good guys and hate the bad guys.

Also a minor niggle but there was some really odd framing choices going on that at first I thought was down to the way the movie was shot; you see them in the B-Movies or low budget movies I watch alot where the framing of the shot cuts of the top of the head and bottom of the chin of the person in shot, and I thought this was down to how it was shot but then I started to get the impression that this was a 4:3 aspect ratio movie re-cropped to fit 16:9 aspect ratio screens... typical Disney+ stuff. So I don't know, maybe it's that, or maybe it was shot wrong. Either way it was really distracting and I noticed it alot. I don't think it completely ruined the film for me but it does hamper the way it's presented terribly and makes it a bit uncomfortable to watch.

I do have some good things to say though... honest! I might not have really warmed to the characters much but I can't fault Kimberly J. Brown as Marnie, or Debbie Reynolds as Aggie who were both pretty good in their respective roles and did a good job of being convincing. Kimberly J. Brown especially was better than some of the other younger stars I've watched in these movies. Equally I thought Emily Roeske was very good for her younger age and at times added a bit of light hearted relief and humour to the movie that was sort of lacking in Marnie's character. Comparatively though I thought Robin Thomas was a little bit vanilla and stereocast in his role. Maybe I was looking for it but it was immediately obvious he was the villain of the piece and he was very much the stereotypical bad guy, at times overacting the role way too much. He wasn't terrible but he was very Disney villain and it got a bit too much.

Costume design was all top notch though. And yeah I know this is Disney we are talking about but this is Disney TV and at times the budgets are slim. I've certainly watched others with some more... err... frugal costume design, but no it was all spot on here. The whole town was filled with a colourful cast of characters and although at times it was a little basic: just dog heads on otherwise normally dressed people e.t.c. when they got more creative with it, it looked pretty cool. The goblin characters in particular looked really great as did the hooded demon and there was a real sense of diversity created with the various creature townspeople.

But I'm sorry it's back to the negatives again with the plot. It took quite a while to get going with the main plot line, and then wrapped up the main thread of the movie in a span of about 20 minutes to then tack on the ending bit with the family coming together. I don't feel like it ever really got boring or meandered around as such, it just seemed to take such a long time to build to what the movie was kind of framing as the central focus only for it to be all wrapped up and done in such a short space of time? I think you could have cut some of the preamble out to focus a bit more attention on the kids bringing together the ingredients required to relight the Talisman and it would have maybe felt a bit more like an adventure movie. Instead there seemed to be much more focus on Marnie and her development into a witch which I guess is fine but the same could have been accomplished with a bit more focus on the actual events of the movie.

Yeah, so I thought this one was a bit of a struggle to be honest. It wasn't a bad movie, far from it, but as I mentioned it's the first one I've watched that boiled down the basic elements of a movie to such a simplistic level that it genuinely felt it was too young for me. And it got very cheesey, very cringey in spots. I struggled to really enjoy it and be interested in the peril of the main characters and I say this as an adult watching back a movie obviously intended for children, but hey it's part of the job: reviewing these DCOM movies. I'd absolutely let my kids watch it, despite Marnie being something of a poor role model and, if I had any kids... I'm sure they'd enjoy it, but from an objective point of view I didn't think this was a good as some of the others I've watched. Light 2 out of 5.