“All Hallow’s Eve” is the fiftieth movie involving Halloween in the last five years named “All Hallow’s Eve” but this time it’s more of a low budget Disney-lite family film. Its Harry Potter meets “Halloweentown” in one of the more painfully derivative and hokey attempts to build a franchise around a teen witch in a long time. It’s not to say “All Hallow’s Eve” is terrible, but it’s a movie that has way too many ideas and not enough of a budget or script to help realize them. So characters spend a lot of time sitting around and explaining things, rather than allowing us to bask in the awe of magic and fantasy. In “All Hallow’s Eve,” Lexi Giovagnoli plays Eve Hallow. No seriously.
Tag Archives: Adventure
King Kong (1976)
I’m not against contemporizing “King Kong,” but director John Guillermin shows us how to take a very simple concept like “King Kong” and completely botch it from minute one. It’s not like “King Kong” has a complex story. It’s a fairly exciting adventure about a giant monster, the woman he loves, and New York being torn to shreds by this out of place animal. Apart from being utterly abysmal, “King Kong” is also way too long, with a premise retrofitted for the seventies that stretches the limits of suspension of disbelief. For a movie about a giant ape climbing the Twin Towers, it’s sad that the whole plot to get King Kong in to New York is the most far fetched element I had difficulty buying in to.
Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
IN SELECT THEATERS OCTOBER 28TH – Although Henry Selick does a damn fine job of directing what is one of the most entertaining stop motion animated films, “The Nightmare Before Christmas” has Tim Burton’s stamp all over it. It’s about an outcast, a love for the Gothic and Halloween, and it’s unabashedly menacing. Though Henry Selick’s animated movie was originally touted to kids, the film is very much a dark and harrowing narrative about monsters from the Halloweentown infiltrating the Christmastown, and using the traditions and rituals to terrorize random victims. One montage even features kids getting very creepy presents like a shrunken head, and a snake. Jack Skellington is the pumpkin king who is the anti-hero that finds himself restless with Halloween and accidentally becomes the villain when he falls in love with Christmas.
Munchies (1987)
I’m shocked New Concorde wasn’t sued by Steven Spielberg, since “Munchies” is about the closest rip off of “Gremlins” I’ve ever seen. While previous wannabes were just copying the formula of mischievous and often dangerous monsters wreaking havoc, “Munchies” goes so far as to copy the aforementioned horror fantasy right down to the monsters, all of whom bear striking resemblances to the enigmatic gremlins. Aimed toward a younger audience, but sporting a lot of raunchy humor, “Munchies” is set in a small town where young aspiring comedian Paul and his archaeologist father Cecil (Harvey Korman) find a small monster in a cave. Convinced it’s an alien of a sort, they take the friendly monster home and decide to make it their pet.
Chubbies (2014)
Despite being very rough around the edges, and at times shoddily edited, “Chubbies” is a film that has its heart in the right place. It’s “Ghoulies” meets “Sorority Girls in the Slimeball Bowl o Rama” and it has a fun concept to follow its mixing of sub-genres. “Chubbies” left me laughing, rolling my eyes, and gazing in sheer disbelief at what director Chris Hartman was able to pull off. In the planet Snerd, sex has been outlawed and all forms of sexual stimulation are illegal. When a group of sex hungry aliens known as Chubbies break free from their jails, they crash land on Earth. They end up at the local Bowl-o-Rama where a group of friends are having their very own Halloween party after hours.
Critters 2: The Main Course (1988)
With the original “Critters,” the producers adhered to a certain kind of formula that made the monsters from space seem like twisted cousins of “E.T.” With “The Main Course,” director Mick Garris is able to go beyond the limits of the concept and widen the mythology of the Krites and their bounty hunters. What’s more, Garris is also able to get so much more creative than the first film, as well as offer a better variety of Krites, and how they’re capable of devouring humans when they crash land on Earth once more. One of the best moments of “Critters 2” involves the krites working together as a hive and forming a gigantic ball that goes rolling through town.
Critters (1986)
Stephen Herek’s “Critters” is a fun and gory horror science fiction film that knows exactly what kind of movie it is. It’s neat a mix of a monster movie and a tongue in cheek action sci-fi movie. As well it delights in doling out a lot of gruesome kills and fun nuggets of very light comedy that will arouse some chuckles, but never ruin the momentum of the movie. Up in the space in a prison space ship, the Krites have managed to escape their cells and are now on the run. They’ve taken hold of a ship of their own and are headed for Earth. The alien overlords hire two skilled bounty hunters with blank faces, urging them to find the krites before they reach Earth and wreak incomprehensible havoc on the population. With the bounty hunters on their tails, the Krites have crash land on a farm in the middle of a rural town in Kansas.