“The Night Before Halloween” should actually be called “I Know What You Did The Night Before Last Halloween Around 11:50pm,” as it borrows heavily from those slasher themes and, once again, steals a lot from “The Ring.” Someone at the Syfy Channel must have loved “The Ring,” as they seem persistent on copying its themes involving teens running from a dark curse that is targeting them or some such nonsense. Seriously, a movie like this should not be so complicated and confusing to follow. The storyline and mythos behind it is actually so confusing no one in the movie can ever explain what the hell is going on. To anyone. Set on the night before Halloween, a group of girls have a vicious prank played on them from local boys in their school. During the prank one of the friends, Beth, is accidentally electrocuted and nearly killed.
Tag Archives: Halloween
All Hallows’ Eve (2016)
“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.
6 Shorts Perfect for Halloween
So you’re getting ready for a Halloween party and don’t have time for a feature but would like to watch something to set the atmosphere for yourself or you just want to watch some bite-size entertainment. So, in that spirit, here are a few great shorts for the season.
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.
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.
Ranking the “Bob’s Burgers” Halloween Episodes
If you’re still waiting for the heir apparent to “The Simpsons,” it’s already here and it’s been on television for seven years, now. “Bob’s Burgers” is a consistently hilarious, well written, and sweet series about a lower middle class family working hard to make ends meet and deal with the wackiness of life. Almost every year “Bob’s Burgers” has hosted their own holiday episodes, including Halloween, and they’ve managed to build some of the most memorable episodes of the series through the holiday, using it as a means of emphasizing some of the more unique traits within every character.
With a new Halloween episode of “Bob’s Burgers” arriving on October 23rd, I thought I’d rank and rave about every Halloween episode from the series so far.
Which “Bob’s Burgers” Halloween episode is your favorite? Let me know in the comments.
Ernest Scared Stupid (1991)
It’s really hard to ignore the charm of Ernest and his Halloween adventure. “Ernest Scared Stupid” most definitely has a lot of nostalgic value and sentimental value, but it’s also a very good kids’ horror movie where Ernest battles a bunch of trolls. Ernest and Jim Varney has just always had a good chemistry and here it’s on full display when trolls are unleashed during Halloween. Here, Varney plays Ernest as a garbage collector in a Missouri town. Hundreds of years before a troll that used magic to turn kids in to wooden dolls was locked in a tree and kept dormant. Ernest helps his three friends Kenny Binder, Elizabeth and Joey construct their own tree house which they use as a means of entertainment and warding off the local bullies.