Halloweentown [1998]

[Cross-posted on the Bad Movie Night Facebook page.]

In honor of Halloween time, we decided to watch "Halloweentown," a nostalgic movie for Sarah and Kay that we were pretty sure wasn't particularly good. Overall, it's what you expect from a Disney Channel original movie in the days before "High School Musical." It's cute, simple, has a whiny pre-teen/teen for the audience to relate to, and it's very predictable. Bad is a strong word but I wouldn't go so far as to call it good. It's our childhood.

The film centers around the Cromwell family where a single mother abhors Halloween and keeps her three kids (Marnie, the whiny teen, Dylan, the excessively practical one, and Sophia, the little quiet one) from experiencing anything relating to it for reasons unknown. Her rules are rocked slightly when quirky grandma who loves Halloween shows up for the day and helps to make their evening fun with costumes and stories. Marnie awakens in the night to overhear her mother and grandma talking about how they are witches but how her mother wants her kids to grow up normal and powerless. Marnie is not having that so she and her siblings follow grandma and hop the bus to Halloweentown, where she lives. It is a town full of all the monsters and demons you expect living peacefully together with the exception of a weird plague thing that's turning them evil. Grandma tries to make a spell to help save the town but it doesn't work out and just as they go out to start working on a new one, mom shows up to ruin the fun, and then mom and grandma get frozen in a movie theater. It makes a bit more sense in context. The kids take it upon themselves to complete the spell and destroy the bad guy who happens to be their mom's ex. They succeed and mom has a change of heart about the whole "witch" thing and invities grandma to come and live with them to teach them the ways of magic.

This film is pretty harmless. It's actually a solid kids movie albeit, it's 90s as all get out and has some weird makeup and bad green screen as a result of a low budget. Overall, it holds up in that respect. In order to make sure the night was actually ruined, Adam reminded us of the short-lived 90s Nickelodeon show "Weinerville" which is an actual nightmare that we had repressed. 

So yeah, "Halloweentown" is fun and not bad. If you want suffering, watch "Weinerville."