No one celebrates Halloween like the friends from the hundred acre woods. Although you have to appreciate how they embrace most holidays, including Thanksgiving. In either case, as usual, the gang is very ready to trick or treat, and they all have their own motives for going out for the night. Pooh is especially dead set on stealing honey from the local bee hive and he plans to do so by dressing as a bee for the holiday. Rabbit is also anxious to keep his pumpkin patch in good shape, especially with the group out on their usual antics.
Tag Archives: Fantasy
Goosebumps: Attack of the Jack-o-Lanterns (1996)
It is Halloween and Drew is ready to dress up as her favorite superhero and collect candy. It’s her favorite night of the year but her best friend Walker has no desire to go out for the holiday. That’s also because there’s been a string of mysterious disappearances over the last month, with four people gone without a trace. After successfully convincing her parents to let her go out at night, Drew convinces Walker to go out for Halloween, now that her friends from her old neighborhood Shane and Shana have come to town to pay her a visit.
Tower of Terror (1997)
Director D.J. McHale manages to take what is a very simple but iconic ride for Disney World and transform it in to a pretty engrossing and charming supernatural thriller. “Tower of Terror,” now being remade in to a bigger budget Hollywood film, is one of the very few adaptations from Disney that not too many people are aware of. It precedes “Pirates of the Caribbean” and adds a neat mythology to the ride overall. “Tower of Terror” (sans the “Twilight Zone” connection) is something like “The Shining” except filled with a much sweeter tale about jealousy, grief, and a gross misunderstanding. Steve Guttenberg plays tabloid photographer Buzzy, a once prominent journalist now reduced to taking pictures for goofy supermarket papers. Alongside his loyal niece Anna (a teenaged Kirsten Dunst), the pair begin investigating the dreaded Hollywood Towers.
My Stepmother is an Alien (1988)
Richard Benjamin’s movie is one without an audience. It’s too adult for kids, and too childish for the adult crowds. It tries very hard to pass itself off as a latter day “Splash” with aliens in place of mermaids, but the problem is Dan Akroyd was never really Tom Hanks, and the writers push the child element on the film so much, “My Stepmother is an Alien” ceases to become an out of this world romance comedy. It’s instead more about accepting your parents have to move on, with the central character being a very young Alyson Hanigan rather than, oh, the adults. Kim Basinger plays an alien named Celeste, from a seemingly big planet of hot aliens who comes to Earth to study an unnatural occurrence on her planet.
The Haunted Mansion (2003)
It is a shame that “The Haunted Mansion” has the Eddie Murphy taint all over it. I think there’s a good movie to be made about “The Haunted Mansion” and it doesn’t involve the same old Eddie Murphy tropes we’ve seen in the past fifteen years. Eddie Murphy is once again a dopey work a day man who babbles to himself, and is so self involved he can’t notice his family is right in front of him. It’s the same goofy plot points that count as conflict in Eddie Murphy movies these days. Murphy is one note yet again as workaholic dad Jim Evers, a dopey real estate agent impossibly married to a beautiful woman who is, as always, put upon and ever patient toward his priorities of choosing work over family. When Jim’s wife Sara is called to an old mansion to oversee the property, Jim tags along hoping to garner a sale.
The Crooked Man (2016)
It’s shocking how well Jesse Holland’s horror film “The Crooked Man” plays, because Syfy original movies are rarely ever as entertaining as this. “The Crooked Man” is part “Lights Out,” and part “It Follows” with a dash of Creepypasta. When she was twelve, Olivia was at a slumber party and was encouraged by her friends to visit a creepy website where if a nursery rhyme about the dreaded crooked man was read aloud, he’d be invoked. Despite their initial disbelief, Olivia witnesses her friend be viciously murdered by the horrific crooked man and is blamed for her death. Six years later when Olivia comes back in to her home town, she realizes that she’s not entirely welcomed there. What’s worse is that the people that were there that night are being viciously murdered by the horrific Crooked Man, who has a bone to pick with the witnesses that night.
Howard Lovecraft and the Frozen Kingdom (2016) [Blu-Ray/DVD/Digital]
Before he was an iconic horror writer that every horror buff emulated, HP Lovecraft was a young boy named Howard whose imagination kept him company in 1897. After visiting his father in an asylum and consoling him for suffering delusions about monsters and beasts, Howard’s mother gives him his father’s journal to read for fun. Little does Howard know that his father’s journal, which happens to be the Necronomicon, is a portal to a magical world where Howard makes friends with a lot of creatures, all of which are not as they seem. There he makes friends with a squid faced monster that becomes his loyal guard, and has to face a monstrous being known as the Shoggoth in hopes of stopping an unusual queen who wants the Necronomicon.