It truly pains me to see that “Spirit Halloween: The Movie” is a genuinely terrible movie, in spite of its best intentions. I love “Spirit Halloween,” I love the whole spirit of their stores, and their charity work, but “The Movie” is a misfire on all cylinders. It’s a boring, poorly concocted adventure film that, shocking enough, doesn’t know how to utilize the Spirit Halloween setting all that well at all. The best way to describe “Spirit Halloween: The Movie” is that, at best, it feels like mid-tier straight to video fodder from Charles Band circa 1994. Even the script feels retro-fitted from probably a screenplay that was finished in the late 90’s.
Friends Jake, Carson, and Bo love Halloween but can’t agree on how to celebrate it. They come to a compromise and decide that spending the night inside a Spirit Halloween store will guarantee them one last adventure. Once inside the store, though, events spiral out of control as the ghost of Alex Windsor, a reviled town landlord from town’s past, resurfaces in the store. Now it’s up to the three boys and Carson’s sister Kate, to survive the night and stop Windsor.
You can make the argument that it’s meant for kids, but I don’t know if even kids will really garner all that much interest in it. It wants to be a family drama about Halloween, it wants to be a coming of age film about preteens (Marisa Reyes is fine), and it also wants to be this high brow fantasy adventure in the vein of “Night at the Museum.” This grasping for various narrative themes makes “Spirit Halloween: The Movie” feel like one giant mess without ever really zeroing in on one really solid idea. To make things worse, the “Spirit Halloween,” which becomes the focal point of the second half, never quite brings the setting alive to feel like we’re witnessing something extraordinary or immense.
It all feels so lethargic. Not to mention the reasoning for the store coming to life feels so pointless; it’s explained that the evil spirit of a restless old miser Alex Windsor brings to life the props for the store to corner the kids and inhabit one of their bodies terrorize their town once again. And then what? Would he become an evil landlord again? Did he have powers or some kind of world domination plan? Also, since “Spirit Halloween” stores are mainly pop up stores during the season, does that mean that Windsor’s angry spirit had been haunting previous stores on that land? Was he tormenting Jamba Juice employees, or Outlet clothing shoppers at one point?
I still think there could be a fun movie made from “Spirit Halloween” (they volunteer in some interesting charities after all), but David Poag’s film sadly isn’t it. Hey, at least it has Christopher Lloyd.