I’m saying it now. This movie is bad. The plot is lifeless. The dialogue gets painful. It’s like they gave up in the middle of the script and said: “Well, we have two creative ideas. Now let’s just put in cliche after cliche. Our plot doesn’t make sense? Who cares! It’s for kids!” Grrrr…… This is by far the least developed of the Halloweentown trilogy. But I said all three, and… heh, stupid guilty pleasures.
This film’s plot starts two years from the last time we saw the magical Cromwells. Marnie has transcended puberty, Dylan’s balls have also dropped, (it took me ten minutes to remember his name. I was writing “Dexter” for a while), and Sophie is still the generic little sister, except she’s not as cute anymore. Since Mom is now pretty much cool with magic now, the family is in the middle of throwing a Halloween party, with all of the decorations coming out of Grandma Aggie’s Mary Poppins bag (Stop ripping yourself off, Disney), when Marnie meets a new neighbor, a cute boy named Kal. Being a Disney protagonist, Marnie is of course immediately smitten, and gives him a private tour of the house, including Aggie’s magically hidden bedroom. Can anyone else tell where this is going just based on his name because Disney wasn’t creative enough to even try to hide their plot device? You guessed it!
Is this a stalking PSA? It looks like a stalking PSA.
Kal steals Aggie’s spell book and sneaks it out of the house, leaving the family confused when Aggie’s bag runs out of stuff. Marnie and Grandma realize that the spell book is missing and decide to go to Halloweentown to get the spare, leaving behind a red skull to communicate with the rest of the family. (Because cell phones wouldn’t work, or was it a long-distance rate thing?)
But things aren’t quite right in Halloweentown, as everything has turned gray and dull and the monsters have turned into humans. Even the town’s giant Jack-o-Lantern, which somehow ended up in a more condensed part of town than it was in the last film, has turned into a block of gray bricks, out of which pops:
……….You know, I just can’t take you seriously when I’m staring up into your nostrils.
Kal reveals his master plan of taking revenge on Halloweentown and the mortal world for… reasons… (He hasn’t said it yet, but come on… Kal… Kalabar… Disney thinks we’re stupid…..) He stole Aggie’s book to make sure the Cromwell witches wouldn’t get in his way, since he’s going to change the monsters into humans and the humans into monsters. Which makes no sense, but who cares? Marnie and Aggie rush over to Aggie’s house, where they search at a comedically sped-up rate, but to no avail. The book is lost. But it just so happens that Grandma Aggie knows where all the lost things go: to the house of a creepy old curmudgeon named Gort! Where else?! But the pair are too late, since Gort’s house has been affected by the “Gray Spell” and he has sold off all of his junk in a yard sale, including Aggie’s book.
This feels insulting somehow…
Things only get worse when the Gray Spell catches up to Aggie, sucking all the color out of her and giving her the urge to match left socks. She gives Marnie a time-travel spell just before the curse takes full effect, leaving Marnie alone to figure things out by herself. Well, alone except for the not-necessary troll boy from the last movie that I felt no need to mention. Because he did nothing there, and he’s doing nothing here. Except changing from gray to orange and giving Marnie moral support.
Marnie and the troll, Luke, travel back in time to when the book should be in Gort’s house. By some miracle, Gort remembers the book, but lets the pair search in his junk piles of hell for what is presumed to be a few hours before he tells them that he had sold the book to Kalabar fifty years prior to this moment in the past. You douchebag. Even worse, Marnie loses the paper the time-travel spell was on, and it seems that anything lost in Gort’s house disobeys the Laws of Conservation of Matter and is never seen again. So we kill ten minutes as Marnie attempts to remember the spell. But, oh joyous day! She accidentally figures out the counter spell for the Gray Spell: the cure is “Trapa” because… the curse was “Apart”?………. *cough,cough, LAZY!!!!
Meanwhile, Marnie’s mom accepts a date with Kal’s “dad”, who’s actually a golem made of frogs. Frogs are apparently very romantic, since he asks Gwen to a… high school dance… and asks her to put on the ugliest mask in the history of green masks. But don’t worry! It’s a plot device! Dylan and Sophie are apparently smarter than both their sister and their mother and figure out something’s going down at the dance, so they follow Gwen via broomstick and crash the dance. (Because no one would notice a couple of kids flying through the air on a broomstick?)
Back in Halloweentown, one of Marnie’s attempts to go back to the present lands Marnie and Luke in one of Kal’s spells, where Marnie figures out that Kal is the son Kalabar never, ever mentioned. Kal tells Marnie that at midnight he intends to turn all the humans wearing Halloween costumes into the monsters they’re portraying, including Marnie’s mother, who’s wearing the goblin mask (I told you it was a plot device.) But Marnie and Luke break out of the spell, and they use Gort’s magical timeline (that he kept to himself while Marnie tried to remember the time spell. Again, what a douche.) to travel back to the present. Grandma Aggie is turned back to normal, and apparently no one can ever say the word “apart” again! Yay, plot holes! But Marnie is too late to get back to the mortal world, as the clock strikes midnight and the bullet-proof metal door of a portal is closed until next Halloween, stranding Marnie and Aggie as all the humans turn into monsters. Understandably scared, Sophie and Dylan search through the crowd, trying to find their mo–
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!
HOLY SHIIIIIT! DISNEY, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?! THIS IS A CHILDREN’S FILM! It’s one thing for your animated villains to be scary, but my God. We do not turn our mothers into the Green Goblin! And we do not sic said mothers on their own children!! Sophie and Dylan escape their mother and contact Marnie through the skull, and they decide to force the portal open, using the dumbest, most cringe-inducing chant you will ever not remember. BUT IT WORKS! Marnie and Aggie burst through the portal just in the nick of time, facing down Kal in one last stand.
The last stand: Kal surrounds himself in black vines, Marnie swats the books out of his hands, the black vines eat Kal. ………… No, that’s all of it. And everyone was normal again. Oh, and the portal between the world is open forever and the monsters come to visit and all the humans are all really chill with it. The end.
This is an awful, awful movie. So many problems… Let’s start listing! Don’t you think Kalabar might have brought up his son in the first film? Like he would have seen Gwen’s kids and said, “Oh, hey, I have a son just about your daughter’s age.” Like a normal parent. What self-respecting adult willingly goes to a dance in a gymnasium? When your date literally croaks like a frog and dresses like a frog, isn’t that any woman’s cue to run in the other direction? Why is Sophie smarter than everyone? What was Dylan’s purpose other than to whine? Did Marnie really need moral support from a troll that was “too-cool-for-you” in the last movie and even less necessary to the plot in this movie? Did Kal’s spell go past the border of the gym? Were helpless parents eaten by their transformed children somewhere? Did this night even have a body count? Is this an accurate representation of how adults thought kids spoke in the late 90s? Could the writers not think of a better spell than “apart”? Were the writers drunk? Did Gort get sued for being a rip-off of Oscar the Grouch? Could the Halloweentown inventors really not come up with anything more comfortable than talking heads as communication devices?
“Bring me to your filthy ear again and I will bite it off.”
This film has many, many flaws. The writing was lazy, the characters were flimsy and Grandma Aggie spent more time being gray and boring than I ever want to see. It’s Debbie Reynolds! You got the famous actress! USE HER!! The revenge plot made about as little sense as it could, especially considering that the Kalabar and son team had been apparently cooking up this plot for decades. They really couldn’t come up with anything better. At the least, the effects were definitely better than they were in the last film, though I have to admit it didn’t have that tough an act to follow in that regard.
In conclusion, this movie, like so many sequels, really has no right to exist except to buff up DVD sales. It has no value as a movie outside of its trilogy, so thank God it has two other movies two cling to for success. It’s only purpose is to serve as a shoddily-built bridge to its much better sibling, Halloweentown High, which I’ll be reviewing tomorrow. Until then, maybe the portal from Halloweentown will open up in my closet. I’ll be ready with my machete. Good night!
Geeky, nerdy and proud 