Tween Spirit

Debbie Reynolds, still lighting up the screen.

I’ve seen two of the four films in Disney’s Halloweentown franchise: Halloweentown (1998) and Halloweentown II: Kalabar’s Revenge (2001).

Maybe my expectations were unrealistic for a Disney cable movie, but the town of the title was seriously disappointing. This Halloweentown is simultaneously garish and banal, probably alright for a juvenile audience but hardly up to snuff for anyone who remembers the enticing gloom of A Nightmare Before Christmas (1993, also Disney). Okay if there’s no budget for elaborate sets and makeup, but darkness is free—and forgiving.

I think it’s significant that the movie’s best moments are in fact the shadowy ones: the Halloween night opener, when Grandma Agatha Cromwell (Debbie Reynolds) arrives with a witchly twinkle, and the scene where the Bad One is first revealed to us, roiling out of the screen in a dim theater. In contrast, the outdoor sequences in Halloweentown, with its cheap-looking creatures plodding hither and yon, has all the magic of Poughkeepsie on a partly cloudy afternoon.

As I understand it, Halloweentown II got a lot of flak for being too dark, so I have to concede the original filmmakers must have known their audience. Obviously, they had more money to spend the second time around. Unfortunately, the convoluted story is exhausting, and Debbie is mostly sidelined (mistake). It’s unlikely I’ll ever see the other two followups.

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