Ranking The “Home Improvement” Halloween Episodes from Best to Worst

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There are very few shows that have Halloween based episodes, let alone Halloween based episodes every year. Beside “Roseanne,” Tim Allen’s show “Home Improvement” celebrated Halloween almost every year, and it was almost always memorable. “Home Improvement” is one of my favorite sitcoms of all time, a family oriented laugh aloud comedy about accident pseudo-celebrity Tim Taylor, his very patient wife Jill and their rambunctious trio of sons. “Home Improvement” in its golden age was often hysterical and heartfelt, and reveled in devising new ways to put the characters in to scary situations involving the holiday.

The writers genuinely came up with interesting ideas almost every year, and it was fun watching Tim pull pranks on his family, and watching the pranks unfold in to hilarious reactions. From a head bursting through a wall, to Tim losing an arm while dancing with wife Jill, no one took on the holiday like Tim Taylor. To celebrate an often too overlooked sitcom from the nineties, here is a ranking of the Halloween episodes from the series from the absolute best, to the utter worst. What are some of your favorite “Home Improvement” episodes?

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R.L. Stine’s Monsterville: Cabinet of Souls (2015)

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I don’t know how they keep recruiting these Disney stars to headline the RL Stine movies. Disney always seems to have such a tight grasp on them. In either case, “Cabinet of Souls” is the very definition of an RL Stine story, except with a much longer format. It surely sports the same mold and aesthetic with a small town, teen protagonists, and evil villains that seek to ruin their innocence somehow. It stumbles on occasion, and there’s a clear lack of wit that you can usually find with Stine’s yarns, but it’s a pleasing movie; especially if you’re a fan of Dove Cameron, Katherine McNamara, or Ryan McCartan.

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Hellions (2015)

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It’s pretty sad when you sit through a horror movie and the only thing you can take away is the delight of seeing another talented “Degrassi” alum taking on the horror genre. Chloe Rose was one of my favorite characters of the series, and its fun to see her tackling more complex material. “Hellions” is ultimately a mixed bag that presents brief glimmers of greatness, but constantly stumbles in to sheer mediocrity and incoherency. To make matters worse, the film ends without any real clarification of what we’d just seen. Bruce McDonald seems to be building up to something, but then just shuts the film down before we can make sense of anything we’d just seen.

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Voices of October: Diary of a Halloween Haunt (2015)

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For some people Halloween is a state of mind and not just a holiday. For the Counelis family, it’s a yearly ritual that begins in the middle of the year and ends when November finally rears its head. It’s refreshing to see a documentary that’s more grounded and down to Earth, and much like films like “American Scream,” Paul Counelis documents his family’s journey to build and construct a haunted house mainly because they want to give their neighbors some memories. Surely there’s a profit to be had by a haunted attraction, but that’s not what the holiday means to Paul Counelis and his large family.

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Tales of Halloween (2015)

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I’m enjoying the rush of Halloween themed movies coming to theaters thanks to talented and ambitious filmmakers. If there’s any holiday deserving of a sub-genre it’s Halloween. “Tales of Halloween” is a near perfect anthology horror film that embraces the holiday and uses it as fuel to tell some weird, wild, creepy tales all set around a small town celebrating the wicked holiday. Much like “Terror Tract” and “Trick r Treat,” the anthology is set around a small suburb where inexplicably terrifying and nasty things happen on the holiday. Like “Trick r Treat,” most of the stories connect with each other and garner references to the former tale. It assures that audiences will have to watch the film over and over to catch every Easter Egg thrown to us.

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Tales of Halloween (2015) [Fantasia Film Festival]

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FANTASIA FILM FESTIVAL

10 tales, 11 filmmakers, tons of mayhem and fun, Tales of Halloween is set one Halloween night in a suburb where all kinds of scary, funny, spooky things go down. In this anthology, the near-perfection radio host talking us from story to story, played by Adrienne Barbeau in a part so close to her role in The Fog, one could think it was the very same character which is most likely very intentional. The 10 short stories contained here vary widely from urban legend come to life to revenge story to alien invasion to neighborhood battles and everything in between. The Decalogue of stories all connect at one point or another through characters passing into other stories or by location choices.

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Garfield Holiday Collection (DVD)

For fans of Jim Davis’ Lasagna loving feline, the “Garfield Holiday Collection” is now on DVD, bringing together group of some of the best holiday specials starring Garfield, Odie, and their owner Jon. I’m not usually one to call boxed sets perfect these days, but hot damn is this compilation of Garfield TV specials perfect. I wish I’d seen more of the Garfield Halloween Special when I was a kid but I don’t remember it being on very often. That said, it’s still a damn good special in which Jim Davis acknowledges he purposely tried to scared children.

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