Halloweentown High (2004)
Rated TV-G
Score: 3 out of 5
Halloweentown High marked the point at which this franchise "graduated", so to speak, from the world of family comedies to the world of teen comedies, or at least the Disney Channel's heavily sanitized version thereof. Is it still a good movie like its predecessors? Yeah, it is. Is it as good as they were? No. Even though the characters are older and now talk about dating, this is probably, for better or worse, the most avowedly kid-oriented movie in the series thus far. The Disney Channel "brand" ever since The Lizzie McGuire Show was always about presenting a G-rated fantasy of high school and teenage life for adolescent kids who watched their "cool" older siblings and wanted to be like them, and that is very much reflected here. The monsters are toned down, and any similarities to actual high school come from its sanitized recycling of the tropes of old John Hughes teen movies filtered through Saved by the Bell reruns. But when it comes to delivering that formula, it's decent, and it gets the job done as a family-friendly comedy with a nice message and a good heart.
After the second film ended with Marnie opening a new portal between Halloweentown and the mortal realm, this film concerns her proposal to take several monster kids from Halloweentown and have them go to a normal human high school in order to work towards openness between the two worlds. When she facetiously bets the Cromwell family's magic that she can do it, the elders take her up on that offer, and now she, her aunt Aggie, and her mother Gwen have to welcome a bunch of "Canadian" "exchange students" (actually the monster kids disguised as humans) who will be attending high school and learning about human culture. What follows is a comedy about Marnie trying to help the new kids fit in at school, while staying one step ahead of an order of knights that hates magic and monsters and wants to keep the mortal realm free of them -- and if you've seen any movie in which a character is not who they seem to be, you can figure out right away who the bad guys are. Meanwhile, Marnie starts falling for a human boy named Cory, who immediately figures out that she herself isn't entirely normal, and winds up getting put through all manner of comic hijinks over it. The returning cast from the prior films is once more the best thing about these movies, with Debbie Reynolds still a lovable old weirdo as Aggie and Kimberly J. Brown feeling more comfortable than ever as Marnie after three movies; had they kept her around for the fourth, I'm sure that they'd still be making these today. The new kids all felt lifted from central casting, but central casting did their jobs well, as even though they were playing a collection of teen movie stereotypes with monster makeovers, they all felt invested in the material. Finn Wittrock also made for a charming and handsome romantic lead for Marnie to pair up with, even if the film couldn't really find much to do with him outside of subject him to increasingly ridiculous situations as he tries to profess his love for Marnie.
The plot is paper-thin, and so are the themes about acceptance, with everything being resolved way too neatly at the end with little in the way of lasting consequences. The suspicion between the mortal realm and Halloweentown is pretty bluntly meant to be a commentary on racism, and while it might work for the little ones, it kind of fell apart with even a second's thought. Without spoiling anything, the villains are trying to foster hatred between humans and monsters so as to preserve the segregation of their worlds, and it's all handled in a very surface-level manner. On one hand, this film is ahead of its time in some ways; we get exploration of how seemingly "harmless" stereotyping and ethnic jokes (in this case, Halloween decorations that treat the monsters and witches as scary and threatening) aren't so harmless for the people they're denigrating, making them feel left out, unwanted, and alienated from society even if they lacked obviously ill intent. This film is clearly trying to tell viewers that racism is wrong, and at various moments, it sticks the landing. On the other hand, it seems to cop out when it comes to the villain, who, in traditional kids' movie fashion, is evil more or less for the sake of it; he just plain doesn't like "those people" and wants to see them kept separate. Okay, but why? People who are virulently racist like the villain, as opposed to just casually so, are usually like that because they think that they'll get something out of hating the "other"; in his case, as an authority figure, it could've been presented as a matter of him selfishly guarding his own power within the system, which the integration of the human and monster worlds could threaten. The film had bits and pieces of the message it wanted to send, but it never really did more than land some glancing blows.
On a technical level, there are substantially fewer monster effects this time around, and the ones we see don't feel quite so creative. We never actually get to visit Halloweentown itself outside of a handful of scenes in the hall of the town's leaders, and a lot of the "Harry Potter by way of Tim Burton and Lisa Frank" atmosphere is heavily rolled back. This is very much a teen comedy first and a fantasy film second, as opposed to the previous films' balance of fantasy and family comedy. The laughs are still the same inoffensive, cornball humor as before; Mean Girls this ain't, but then again, the laughs, while often obvious, are still there. Reynolds, once again, gets a lot of the best moments as Aggie poses as a teacher to watch over the "exchange students", managing to get the normal kids in her science and history classes wondering what the hell is up with this old lady doing magic tricks and talking about how she knew Shakespeare.
The Bottom Line
While undoubtedly a lesser film, Halloweentown High still works as an amusing diversion, especially if you already like the series and want to see more of these characters.
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I've been told by fans that the alleged fourth Halloweentown movie doesn't exist. Was it really that bad?
Return to Halloweentown (2006)
Rated TV-PG
Score: 2 out of 5
I understand a lot of the ill will that fans of the series have towards Return to Halloweentown. I don't think it's a completely worthless pile of garbage, but if the first three films symbolize why a lot of people of my generation have grown nostalgic for the "good old days" of the Disney Channel, then this one reeks of everything that was wrong with the Disney Channel back then. Decisions both creatively and behind the scenes impacted this film for the worse, with Debbie Reynolds only returning for a cameo, Marnie recast with an actress who looks and acts nothing like Kimberly J. Brown, and a plot that plays out like a half-baked retread of Mean Girls and Harry Potter with only a smattering of the series' magic laid on top. (When I said that a remake of The Craft would work best as a comedy in the vein of Mean Girls or Heathers, I didn't mean this.) It has its moments, but even if you liked all three of the prior films, this one is only barely worth your time.
The plot this time is that Marnie, now almost a grown adult, is heading off to Witch University. Her mother Gwen doesn't want her to go there, but her talk about going to a normal human community college for two years and then getting a bachelor's at State for another two is pretty obviously a cover for why she's really upset: her kids are finally growing up and leaving her a middle-aged empty-nester. I haven't really talked about Judith Hoag a lot in my reviews of these films, but she was always one of the unsung joys of the series as Gwen, even if the films never could decide just how hostile she was to the idea of her kids embracing the family magic. Here, too, she was one of my favorite parts of the movie, especially with her slow breakdown and freak outs at the grocery store, the laundromat, and work. She may have only been a supporting character, but as one of the few major characters who wasn't either sidelined or recast, Hoag was an especially lively presence throughout. And the way that witches in this series use bowls and pools of water to communicate was used to hilarious effect in quite a few scenes. I'm sorry, but I laughed a lot whenever Hoag was on screen; this is probably the funniest she's been in this series, and it's a shame it had to be in the worst movie.
Because this is easily the worst movie in the series. I easily forgave them toning down the creepier elements in the third film because they still kept the supernatural whimsy that was the series' real calling card, but this movie doesn't even have that going for it. One of the first things we learn when we get to Witch University -- a school that, I might add, is so dedicated to the magical arts that it is literally called Witch University -- is that students are not allowed to use magic on campus. (An anti-cheating measure, they justify it as.) Right away, one of the big selling points of this movie, Hogwarts by way of The Nightmare Before Christmas, is nipped right in the bud, especially since we see that the bad guys violate this rule with near-impunity by making sure that they do it when the authorities aren't looking. The monsters that have long been a staple of the series are also pushed to the background, reminding me of nothing so much as Kal's plot in the second film to turn Halloweentown into boring normalville, especially given that one of the film's main "monster" characters is a genie who looks like a normal human woman (i.e. somebody who doesn't need a mask or makeup effects). Altogether, it felt as though the Disney Channel didn't want to shell out the money needed to make a witch school feel truly, well, magical.
That money was better spent, apparently, on replacing Kimberly J. Brown with Sara Paxton. Now, I have no idea what happened behind the scenes, but this was the Disney Channel in 2006, riding high on the success of High School Musical and turning from a generic kids' network into a vehicle for its growing roster of teen idols. Brown didn't really fit that image, but Paxton did, and something tells me that the Disney Channel wanted somebody who would be right at home on what the network was becoming (Paxton having just starred in the tween flicks Sleepover and Aquamarine). Many fans were disappointed, not least of all Brown herself, and I can see why. Paxton is a good actress, I've seen her in numerous films in which she gave good or even great performances, but here, she felt badly miscast. It was obvious immediately that she wasn't Brown, not just in her appearance but in how she played Marnie, who seemed to regress into a grown-up version of the brat she was in the first film. Had this film come out today, #NotMyMarnie would've been a trending hashtag, as Paxton's Marnie seemed to have little in common with her younger self. (I also didn't buy her as a crown princess during a scene where Marnie travels back in time, feeling less like a royal and more like a teenage girl dressing up as one for, well, Halloween.) As for the supporting characters, they were all either forgettable, like Lucas Grabeel returning from the last film to serve as a bland love interest for Marnie, or obnoxious, like the trio of popular girls who serve as the villain's main minions and, for all intents and purposes, the chief antagonists. The actual villain plot (concerning an attempt by a secret society called the Dominion to brainwash everyone using the Cromwell family treasure) felt like an afterthought, drowned out by the presence and antics of the "Sinister Sisters". I get that they were the bad guys, but they weren't lovably evil like Regina George and Heather Duke were; none of them were fleshed out very well beyond stereotype, all of them were ear-splittingly grating, and I just wanted them gone.
The Bottom Line
It's not as bad as many fans say, but it's not all that good either. It's the kind of movie that represents many of the worst stereotypes of the Disney Channel, lacking much of the series' soul in favor of a middling and empty teen flick. I'd only recommend it for the diehard fans, but many of them are still boycotting it on principle.
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