Childhood Wish Fulfillment #2: Halloweentown
Note to Self: Lower Some Expectations
A Quick Search on IMDB: Halloweentown was written by Paul Bernbaum, Jon Cooksey, and Marie Matheson, was directed by Duwayne Dunham, and was released in 1998.
Before the Viewing: I mentioned in the first Childhood Wish Fulfillment post that I wasn’t allowed to watch certain movies because my dad treats MPAA ratings as if they’re the law. And while my mother was also big on making sure I watched things that were age-appropriate, she was mostly concerned with my bedtime.
I bring this up because I spent a lot of my childhood watching shows on the Disney Channel, a network that also had several made-for-TV movies, or Disney Channel Original Movies (DCOM). And I’m sure several of these will be covered under this Childhood Wish Fulfillment series of mine, because they all aired “too late” for me on school nights.
Eight o’clock PM Eastern Standard Time was when my mother told me to turn the TV off and get ready for bed. So, that meant every fall I missed the one DCOM my spooky little self wanted to see most of all.
Halloweentown.
All I really know going into it is that it’s about a girl named Marnie with bangs for days, who, along with her siblings, goes to said Halloweentown where her grandmother, Debbie Reynolds, lives. I think there’s a villain named Calaban or something? Or am I just having flashbacks to reading The Tempest in college? I dunno, we’ll see.
I remember cheap costumes and big pumpkins from the promos on Disney Channel. I remember my friends talking about it on the playground. Most recently, I remember friends of mine now as adults saying it was one of their favorite Halloween movies growing up.
I’m sure that, again, this wish fulfillment of mine isn’t going to blow me away. But I bet it’ll touch me deep in the nostalgia, just like Heavyweights did, and salve the wound that was my early childhood bedtime.
After the Viewing: Well, little Emily, you finally saw Halloweentown. Was it worth it?
Not really.
I’m not going to say it was objectively bad. I’m a twenty-six-year-old. This movie was definitely not made for me. Would I have loved it as a child? Absolutely.
What I noticed most watching Halloweentown is that it features a lot of the classic Disney hallmarks I’ve come to know and expect. For instance, our main character, Marnie, is your typical Disney protagonist — a sassy girl who, for some reason, thinks she’s an adult as soon as that -teen suffix is added to her age. She doesn’t get along with her mother (who looks just like Jessica Chastain, I might add) because she’s never let them celebrate Halloween.
Anyway, another Disney hallmark in this film involves Marnie’s younger brother, Dylan. He’s a “nerd,” meaning he has glasses and is obsessed with science, naturally. He also speaks with a wisdom beyond his age…or like he’s been written by someone who may have never actually spoken to a child before. Every line out of Dylan’s mouth is a snarky comeback to his older sister, a contrived comment about environmental science, or a flat-out denial of everything happening around him. Yes, he’s the classic wet-blanket middle child who would be absolutely exhausting to encounter in the real world.
There’s also the little sister, Sophie (not Soapy, Jesus Christ), who has about three lines in the whole movie, and I personally feel, had the potential to be a really cool character. I wanted her to end up being the only one of the kids to actually have magical powers, especially after all of Marnie’s bragging, but then I realized I was expecting too much from this movie.
Anyway, the film sets up Marnie’s drama with her mother over the whole No Halloween thing right from the get-go. Enter Grandma, straight from her magical bus stop. Debbie Reynolds shows up to visit the family, and it’s apparently normal that she only shows up on Halloween. No Thanksgiving, no Christmas. Just Halloween.
Sorry, I really feel like it’s unfair to be hyper-critical of a movie like this. I want to appreciate it for what it is, a DCOM, but my cynical brain is taking over.
There was just a lot going on that I found myself shaking my head at. Like Debbie Reynolds not noticing that her three grandchildren have snuck onto the same bus she’s traveling to Halloweentown on? Or how easily Marnie and her siblings found all of the ingredients they needed for their spell to save the town? I know I’ve already used the word “contrived,” but it cannot be used enough.
I will say, though, that I liked a lot of the little things in the movie. Like, the stuff they put into all kids’ movies for adults to appreciate. The Elvis-esque sleazy broom salesman and Debbie Reynolds’ microwave with the “bubble,” “toil,” and “trouble,” buttons, those were some nice touches.
However, I felt that the plot moved a little too fast for me. Like, it seemed that more than half of the movie was set-up, then Kalabar’s evil plot was discovered (I was close with Calaban, wasn’t I?) and all of the sudden Marnie and co. knew exactly what to do to save Halloweentown from its creepy mayor?
And don’t even get me started on Marnie’s enemies-to-lovers “romance” subplot. Hard to tell if that was more or less necessary than the bad CGI broom flight scene. I honestly think I was just too spoiled from the Harry Potter franchise to appreciate this movie at my current age.
In Conclusion: At the end of the day, it’s a cute and ultimately harmless Halloween movie made for children. I can 100% see why all of my friends loved it so much when we were growing up. And I would have loved it too, had it aired an hour earlier when I was a kid.
I don’t want to say that I was disappointed. Though I was critical of a lot of aspects of Halloweentown, I do fully acknowledge that it’s just not meant for someone my age, and I think, perhaps, I should have left it unseen to keep up the mystique it held for me as a child.
Where Heavyweights filled me with joy, Halloweentown left something to be desired. But if I ever have kids, I’ll definitely let them stay up past their bedtime to watch it if they want.
