Tuesday, October 15, 2019

Review Double Feature: Halloweentown (1998) and Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge (2001)

It looks like Hocus Pocus gave me a bit of a bug: namely, a desire to seek out some real-deal Disney Channel Original Movies set around the Halloween season. (Hey, they were selling the double-feature DVD for ten bucks at Target.)

So... hi, I'm Kevin, from Kevin's Review Catalogue, and you're watching Disney Channel! *waves wand*

Halloweentown (1998)

Rated TV-G

Score: 3 out of 5

Halloweentown was precisely as corny as I predicted going by the poster, its trailer, its title, and the fact that it's a DCOM. I enjoyed it anyway, in large part for those very reasons. It's a wish-fulfillment fantasy for kids that's wholly unashamed about that fact, eschewing even the more risque jokes of Hocus Pocus in favor of a wholesome, lighthearted tale about the importance of family, and even with its sometimes shaky acting, clunky dialogue, and undeniably dated special effects, it's still an effective family comedy that's remained nostalgic for a reason. How can I possibly hate a movie where a witch, too lazy to properly make witches' brew for her cauldron, heats up instant witches' brew in a microwave that has settings for Bubble, Toil, and Trouble, and then it doesn't work right because the instant kind is always inferior? (A gag that, as somebody who eats plenty of oatmeal, got my nod of approval.)

The film starts off with Marnie Piper, a twelve-year-old girl living in the suburbs with her older brother Dylan, her little sister Sophie, and her mother Gwen, who hates the Halloween holiday with a passion and has raised her kids to do the same. Dylan listened and grew up into a nerd, but Marnie didn't, and so every Halloween she eagerly awaits the annual visit from her quirky grandmother Aggie Cromwell. This Halloween night, however, Marnie overhears an argument between Gwen and Aggie -- an argument over witchcraft, specifically how Aggie wants Marnie to come with her to begin her training as a witch, while Gwen wants her kids to have no part of that life. Intrigued, Marnie follows Aggie to the bus stop with Dylan and Sophie in tow, and it turns out that Aggie wasn't talking out of her backside about all that "witch" stuff. She lives in a place called Halloweentown, populated by monsters who live normal lives away from the "normal" humans, a world that Marnie and her siblings never knew existed until now. However, it turns out that the reason Aggie wanted Marnie to begin her training is because an evil force was haunting the town, draining the lifeforce of its residents before spiriting them away without a trace, and the town's totally-not-evil mayor Kalabar may know something about what's going on...

The fact that Kalabar is evil is pretty bluntly telegraphed almost from the moment he appears on screen, such that it's scarcely a twist when it finally reveals that he is, in fact, the evil sorcerer. This film isn't really interested in that, anyway. No, this is largely a film about the joy of finding out about a magical world that existed right under your nose, one that offers you a place within it where you get to save the day. While this film came out a year before Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone was released in the US, the basics of the story operate on a very similar level, albeit with a basis in American Halloween iconography instead of European fantasy. The film is at its best when it's dropping the viewer into this brave new world that Marnie, Dylan, and Sophie have found themselves in, and their reactions to all the whimsical and mystical goings-on around them. For every joke that didn't work, such as the running gag of Dylan searching for "rational" explanations for what he's seeing before (wisely) giving up, there are plenty more that offer fun plays on all the monsters, from a vampire at the dentist (who is himself the Tooth Fairy) to a cat-lady aerobics instructor to a werewolf who works as a flamboyant hairdresser. On that note, while the CGI is about as bad as you'd expect, the practical effects were surprisingly creative, most notably the skeleton Benny who drives a taxicab in Halloweentown and gets some of the best jokes. This world that Marnie has found herself in may not have had the budget behind it that Hogsmeade did, but what they did with what they had was still remarkable.

The child actors are par for the course for a low-budget family film, which is to say that they aren't terrible but don't really do much to elevate the proceedings. Marnie in particular sometimes felt like a brat, in the manner that a lot of "little girl" characters in family films often do. The clunky dialogue also often drags them down, the characters frequently using far too many words to convey something that could've been conveyed far more effectively with a witty one-liner. The climax where the protagonists face off against Kalabar especially had this problem; I thought of a better line for Marnie to say in one scene almost immediately. All too often, the writing seems to assume that kids won't be able to follow if everything isn't spelled out, much to the film's detriment. There is, however, a silver lining, and that is Debbie Reynolds as the witch grandma Aggie. Playing her less as a wicked witch than a quirky Wiccan, Reynolds clearly didn't feel like she was slumming it in this movie; rather, she was having the time of her life, elevating everyone around her through her joyous presence. She gets some of the film's best jokes, and is without a doubt its most memorable character. Kalabar is also precisely as hammy as he needs to be in a movie like this, especially in his interactions with his bratty sidekick Luke. He wasn't much more than a cheesy bad guy for the heroes to defeat, but Robin Thomas was clearly relishing the part, especially when he was under makeup in his evil sorcerer form.

The Bottom Line

It works for the same reason why people got so attached to Harry Potter, delivering wish fulfillment and an appropriate sense of wonder even where its writing and narrative falter. No wonder the Disney Channel's kept it on hand every October.

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There were two movies on the disc, so I figured, I had eighty minutes to kill, what the hell?

Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge (2001)

Rated TV-PG


Score: 3 out of 5

Halloweentown II: Kalabar's Revenge is the better and more polished version of its predecessor in just about every respect. It does admittedly lose some of the sense of wonder of the first film, if only because none of this is new to us anymore, but while it misses some of its highs, it also markedly improves the special effects and the quality of the acting and writing, the kid actors having grown up and into their roles and the script dropping some of the cheesiness in favor of a more genuinely spooky Tim Burton vibe. It does exactly what a good comedy sequel should, retaining what worked about the original while delivering both some new jokes and a new story, while putting a little more money behind it to fully flesh out the ideas they had before. All in all, it's a worthy successor that, so far, I'd rank as my favorite film in this series, with the original close behind.

Set two years after the original, Marnie is now a teenage girl and a practicing witch. Aggie is now living with the Pipers permanently, with her own hidden room in the house and a magical bag full of all manner of treats for trick-or-treaters. The new visitors this Halloween are Kal and his father Alex, who have both just moved into town and found their way to the Pipers' Halloween party. And before you can say that Kal is evil, he exploits Marnie's immediate teenage crush on him in order to steal Aggie's spellbook. Turns out, he's Kalabar's son, and wants to both drain the magic from Halloweentown and turn the people of the mortal world into monsters, finishing the job that his father had failed to do. When Marnie and Aggie reach Halloweentown to figure out why Aggie's magic is going away, they find it transformed into a dull, grey world, an exaggerated parody of how they see the mortal world, and must race against time to both undo Kal's spell and get back home before they too succumb to the spell's effects. Meanwhile, back home, Marnie's mother Gwen starts falling for Alex, only for Dylan and Sophie to notice that there's something strange about him.

It's clear that, after the first film was a success, they went and got a lot more money to throw around for the sequel. Some of that went into hiring Mary Lambert to direct, and while her career since Pet Sematary has been very hit-or-miss, this is undoubtedly one of her hits. The special effects have seen the biggest upgrade, most notably with how it depicts Halloweentown after Kal's "Grey Spell" overtook it. The environment feels like a twisted version of Pleasantville, with only a few remaining spots of color strewn about, with Marnie and Aggie's bright outfits sticking out amidst everything else. We see less of the wonderful strangeness of Halloweentown this time around, and what we do see is there mostly to showcase what Kal has done to the setting, but in return, we get some genuinely creepy atmosphere from the town, corrupted into something whose "normality" is taken to the point of unsettling in its own right. The monsters do come to play, though, and when the film shows up, they all look the part, done with bang-up makeup work. My personal favorite involved a goblin that someone in the mortal world gets turned into by Kal, a monster that looked like it belonged in a legitimate horror movie. This film had something you don't normally expect from a DCOM, and that's genuine edge to its creepiness.

The acting is a step up from last time, too. Reynolds no longer has to carry the film single-handedly here, with Kimberly J. Brown especially coming across as far more comfortable playing Marnie than she did last time. Instead of a bratty kid, Marnie felt like a teenage girl, one whose journey to save Halloweentown throws her into plenty of fun comic situations that she acquits herself very well in. I groaned at how easily she let Kal into Aggie's room, but after that, she proves resourceful in how she goes about her quest, and with plenty of great comic moments too. Phillip Van Dyke has also grown into his role as Luke, redeemed from his villainy at the end of the last film and now a love interest and sidekick for Marnie, and while Daniel Kountz's Kal wasn't as over-the-top as Kalabar before him, he still felt like a genuine menace. The script, while coming from the same writers as before, also had far fewer clunkers in it, and quite a few genuinely funny exchanges, most notably with Gort, whose house is where everything you've ever lost winds up. (He has a lot of mismatched socks.) Most of the humor is still as corny as ever, as befitting a DCOM, but it's the kind of unabashed Midwestern dad humor that, when told correctly, gets a lot of wholesome chuckles.

The Bottom Line

Probably my favorite of the Halloweentown films thus far, this, I feel, is where it truly came into its own as a kid-friendly horror-comedy. It improves on the original in multiple ways, and while it lacks some of its magic, it's still one worth remembering.

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