Depending on how you contextualize the matter, the Disney Channel film Halloweentown is either a standard tween drama about asserting your independence with a thin layer of watered-down spooky imagery slathered on top, or a standard kitchen sink fantasy family romp with a thin layer of watered-down tween drama sprinkled about. Neither characterization does the production any favors, implying nothing particularly special about the base story while making the flavoring sound unappealing and insufficient. Although you'd have to press me fairly hard to get me confessing I feel any different than this, I think it about as fair to have a go at Halloweentown for what it is as I do for all the films highlighted in this marathon - which is to say, not fair in the slightest. Why take the movie to task for trying to give kids a safe, enjoyable entrypoint into spoopy material and SLIGHTLY more complicated family dynamics than they'd be otherwise used to when its legacy as a nostalgic classic indicates it landed just right with its target audience? There's more than plenty failures inherent to the film's construction to use as fuel for a nice coal-raking beyond its conception, after all!
I more than understand the limitations imposed on a project of this nature. Child labor laws dictate children can't work outside certain hours, so location shoots need to take place during the day and night scenes can't take advantage of natural dark. Filming permits are expensive, as are props and costumes, and the challenges of set dressing grow exponentially when trying to transform a real location. Interiors, though less logistically challenging, still constitute a real expense, and the overall company bottom line will come out healthier if old sets are recycled with minimal changes. Costumes and special effects eat into a budget like nobody's business; cheaper alternatives to the cutting edge and a lack of make-up or prosthetics on the leads make an acceptable cost cutting measure. And we mustn't forget how all of this is done on a TV budget, with a TV production cycle, and a particular target date to hit due to the holiday theming of the picture. Movies are stupid hard to make, and the people behind them deserve no grief for the multiple reasonable compromises necessary to turn in a project on time and in budget.
From an end-viewer's experience, though, it's still hard to lose the feeling of Halloweentown as a disappointing setting. A magical world full of all the monsters and creatures and beings you associate with All Hallow's Eve, realized as a tiny town square with minimal set dressing beyond the big stone jack-o-lantern prop. The interiors we visit could readily double for homes and ice cream parlors and saunas (???) in any Disney Channel production save the inhabitants, who wander about in costuming ranging from passable to obviously inflexible latex. Exterior shots not only rarely leave the tight confines of the town square, they rarely leave one side of the street. Everything about this wondrous fantasy land wherein main character Marnie Cromwell's dreams of becoming a witch feels tiny, dingy, and uninspired, hardly what you want from a children's film trying to sell the magic of a town where it's Halloween every day. I put no blame on the crew or schedule masters for doing their best under doubtlessly cramped, underfunded circumstances, but I do put blame on director Duwayne Dunham for not allocating screen resources better. When compared against the potential of the setting to capture the eye through the whole runtime, I hardly think the puppetry needed to animate a skeleton taxi driver for a handful of scenes a worthwhile choice.
Mark you, for much Halloweentown, I can only tell what the town looks like by squinting at the frame's margins. For reasons I cannot comprehend, practically every dialogue sequence is shot in extreme close-up, with characters' faces completely dominating the picture. Not a medium or wide in sight any time people are talking, regardless of whether the location or action around them would benefit from a slightly pulled-back lens. It's as if the whole movie was shot with the camera parked inches from the actors' faces, which makes for quite the miracle when considering how even the youngest child actor only occasionally acknowledges its presence. Staying so needlessly, uncomfortably close makes the already fairly charmless town feel even more drab and uninviting, because the unexciting image of not-so-great child actors badly emoting as they half-scream through their lines lingers in the brain far more readily than that of a supposedly wondrous setting. At the very least, it's preferable to be pressed up against the kid characters' faces, seeing as they're not half so creepy as Robing Thomas' damn-near pedophilic Kalabar getting up in our business. He's thankfully not in this much, though his scenery chewing delivery towards the end is also afforded no flattery by the overly close camera.
With regards to those kids, I could certainly do with less of them. Not regarding the snarky, self-satisfied dialogue, something endemic to practically all family friendly children's media in the 90s. Not regarding Kimberly J Brown's Marnie, who's only bland and uninteresting in the mold of pretty much all protagonists of this nature. Certainly not with regards to Emily Roeske's Sophie, an actually endearing presence in the film and one I wish had more to do than repeat the same three lines of dialogue over and over again when the scene's not totally focused on her, even if it's just doing some more unique cute things. With regards to Joey Zimmerman as Dylan, the smug, brainy, "rational" brat brother of the bunch. Him being eight years my senior and fully grown nowadays, I feel no qualms in stating I absolutely cannot stand the kid - not the way he's written, not the way he's dressed, not the way he delivers his lines, not the immaturity he inspires in anyone who responds to him, not the basic conception of his character as a skeptic who has to actively call out everything around him as fake before adopting a forced cheery "everything's obviously a dream so I'll roll with it, you freak dream people" attitude, none of it. He's a prominent presence throughout the whole film, getting at least one grating line per scene, and the screenplay's idea of allowing him development is to grant him magic powers and then immediately slide back into the same viewpoint as always. The whole "believe in yourself and love your family and you can do anything" message is fair and fine for a film of this nature, but it stands on shaky ground when the person two inches to the left of the main character going through all this self-improvement journey stuff is talking smack at it every step of the way and seemingly learns nothing by the time the last frame fades. He's awful, and I actively wish he wasn't in the movie, particularly because he reminds me of myself at his age, and I don't think any child needs exposure to that blither.
Halloweentown probably ain't worth all this, as I mentioned up top, much as it's plainly a cheapie attempt to cash in on Tim Burton providing Disney a marketable name and concept in The Nightmare Before Christmas. It's a Disney Channel movie from two decades ago, fer chrissake. All the stuff I've mentioned is bad, but not "all those paragraphs what I wrote up there" bad, and on the whole it's an inoffensive runaround without anything special to its name. Fact of the matter is, there's Homestuck nonsense going today, I get nice and riled up by the thought of Andre Hustle continuing to desecrate the corpse of something that WAS special and meaningful to me, I need a punching bag which doesn't come with painful memories of past fights and undue emotional turmoil, and Halloweentown makes the perfect target. So take that, you nothing of a Disney Channel movie. Bear the brunt of my negative energy, so I might feel better while watching and analyzing Van Gogh tonight.
There are multiple elements at play here to indicate the separate dimension Halloweentown exists within is actually hell, and I don't feel kind enough to the film to think of alternate interpretations for any of them. Benny the skeleton cab driver is slowly roasting for the sins he committed in life, and he probably deserves it.
2.5/5
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