{"id":41098,"date":"2023-10-08T00:01:00","date_gmt":"2023-10-08T04:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=41098"},"modified":"2023-10-08T02:05:35","modified_gmt":"2023-10-08T06:05:35","slug":"spirit-halloween-the-movie-2022","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/10\/08\/spirit-halloween-the-movie-2022\/","title":{"rendered":"Spirit Halloween: The Movie (2022)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>It truly pains me to see that \u201cSpirit Halloween: The Movie\u201d is a genuinely terrible movie, in spite of its best intentions. I love \u201cSpirit Halloween,\u201d I love the whole spirit of their stores, and their charity work, but \u201cThe Movie\u201d is a misfire on all cylinders. It\u2019s a boring, poorly concocted adventure film that, shocking enough, doesn\u2019t know how to utilize the Spirit Halloween setting all that well at all. The best way to describe \u201cSpirit Halloween: The Movie\u201d 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\u2019s.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Friends Jake, Carson, and Bo love Halloween but can\u2019t 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\u2019s past, resurfaces in the store. Now it\u2019s up to the three boys and Carson’s sister Kate, to survive the night and stop Windsor.<\/p>\n

You can make the argument that it\u2019s meant for kids, but I don\u2019t 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 \u201cNight at the Museum.\u201d This grasping for various narrative themes makes \u201cSpirit Halloween: The Movie\u201d feel like one giant mess without ever really zeroing in on one really solid idea. To make things worse, the \u201cSpirit Halloween,\u201d which becomes the focal point of the second half, never quite brings the setting alive to feel like we\u2019re witnessing something extraordinary or immense.<\/p>\n

It all feels so lethargic. Not to mention the reasoning for the store coming to life feels so pointless; it\u2019s 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 \u201cSpirit Halloween\u201d stores are mainly pop up stores during the season, does that mean that Windsor\u2019s angry spirit had been haunting previous stores on that land? Was he tormenting Jamba Juice employees, or Outlet clothing shoppers at one point?<\/p>\n

I still think there could be a fun movie made from \u201cSpirit Halloween\u201d (they volunteer in some interesting charities after all), but David Poag\u2019s film sadly isn\u2019t it. Hey, at least it has Christopher Lloyd.<\/p>\n

Now Streaming Digitally.<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It truly pains me to see that \u201cSpirit Halloween: The Movie\u201d is a genuinely terrible movie, in spite of its best intentions. I love \u201cSpirit Halloween,\u201d I love the whole spirit of their stores, and their charity work, but \u201cThe Movie\u201d is a misfire on all cylinders. It\u2019s a boring, poorly concocted adventure film that, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[64,71,349,441,477,580,793],"class_list":["post-41098","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-movie-reviews","tag-adaptation","tag-adventure","tag-fantasy","tag-halloween","tag-horror","tag-kids","tag-possession"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41098","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41098"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41098\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41303,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41098\/revisions\/41303"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41098"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41098"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41098"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}