SPECIAL SPOTLIGHT: NICKELODEON'S ULTIMATE HALLOWEEN HAUNTED HOUSE

I was recently traveling for work, which meant I was cut off from our TIVO and forced to watch TV in real time in my hotel room, suffering through commercials and whatever random programming happened to be on.  I’ve discovered over the years that one of the few things you can rely on when it comes to TV at odd hours is that SpongeBob Squarepants is likely playing, and that it’s usually your best bet (unless you enjoy reality shows about fish tanks, naked survivalists or men who use chainsaws to make stuff out of wood).  So because I was watching SpongeBob on Nickelodeon I caught a commercial for a special called Nickelodeon’s Ultimate Halloween Haunted House.  Naturally, I was intrigued.

The next day, returned to civilization and our trusty TIVO, I set it to record this special with the rather exhaustingly long name.  I enjoy a good walk-through haunted maze or house, and it looked reminiscent of the old Nickelodeon game shows Fun House or Legends of the Hidden Temple, in which kids navigated elaborate play structures for lame prizes.  The gimmick here is that the kids in questions are all actors from Nickelodeon shows.  Our host was the actor who plays Manny from Modern Family. Why, you ask? At some point he shouted something about loving Halloween, but otherwise I have no idea why he qualified to serve as host for a haunted house Halloween show.  Also, how old is Manny?  Is he 18?  12?  21?  I had a hard time pinpointing the ages of all of the participants, as they seemed to vacillate between actual kids, annoyingly precocious tweens and weirdly stunted early twentysomethings.

Watching this made me feel very old and of touch, because with the exception of Manny and one random girl from Dance Moms (a guilty pleasure of mine) I’d never heard of any of these child-adult actors or the shows they hailed from.  Here’s my break down of the three sets of participants and my best-worst guesses at the shows they star in:

Manny, Girl, Boy, JoJo from Dance Moms

Boy & Girl from Harvey Danger

The girl was likeable and unassuming, aside from her weird, shiny silver jacket.  The boy was disconcerting, since he had an androgynous, ageless quality about him and looked like Ellen DeGeneres and Justin Bieber were cloned into a single, floppy-haired being.  As for Harvey Danger, I’m thinking it’s a show about kid spies?  Or kid stunt doubles?

Four Kids from Game Shakers

This was my favorite group, just because they all looked and acted like actual kids.  One girl had glasses and a cardigan, lending her a sort of 1950ish vibe that I appreciated.  I’ve seen commercials for Game Shakers before, and from what I can tell it’s about kids who play video games and have adventures. 

Legendary Dudas?!

Two Boys from Legendary Dudas Plus the Miz

This was the most inexplicable group.  What the fuck is Legendary Dudas?  Does it have something to do with wrestling, because otherwise why did they pair them with the Miz, who is very much an adult and a wrestler/former Real World cast member?  I didn’t like the Miz when he was on the Real World (which I watched devotedly, back in the day) and I don’t particularly care for him now, either.  Seriously, he has the dumbest wrestling moniker ever.  The two Dudas boys seemed genuinely frightened throughout, while the Miz, who has to be like 40 now, calmly walked around with them and was totally unaffected by the spooky surroundings. 

And now for the main attraction: the haunted house!  Which, unfortunately, was a major letdown.  This was the least scary haunted house ever, even by kid standards.  There were several rooms, each room containing a key that our aforementioned contestants had to locate.  Each room was rather disappointing and sparsely decorated.  There was a library where the scariest thing that happened was some books falling off a shelf.  An indoor pumpkin patch with a scarecrow who came to life (yawn).  A laboratory with some very fake-looking bones, purchased at Party City.  I know this because there was an entire two-minute segment devoted to two other child actors buying random things at Party City.

Look out-- it's a phonograph!

I was expecting big budget special effects—elaborate sets, secret passageways, lasers and other mind-blowing things.  Instead we get Manny sitting at a bank of video monitors saying “’cue Jojo from Dance Moms to sit in a rocking chair dressed like a giant rag doll!”  The kids all acted appropriately terrified, but since they’re all actors I kept wondering if they were actually scared or just playing it up for the cameras.

If there was a winner, I can’t remember who it was or what they won or even if all of the kids survived.  So Nickelodeon’s Ultimate Halloween Haunted House was ultimately a bust, save that it made me feel very out of touch and confused and left me with a hankering to buy fake bones at Party City.

FILM FOCUS: THE SCREAM TEAM

The Scream Team is one of many Halloween-themed Disney Channel original movies.  My only knowledge of it was that it co-starred Kathy Najimy as a ghost, and that was certainly enough to pique my interest.  Upon finally watching it yesterday (it first aired in 2002), I was pleased to discover that the Halloween-theme was prominent.  Too many of the “spooky” Disney Channel movies rely on supernatural elements and throw in a pumpkin or two in the background for Halloween cred.  The Scream Team actually takes place around Halloween and incorporates the holiday into the plot.

And what a plot!  What a convoluted, overly-complicated, disparate plot!  The movie begins by showing a grandfather’s corpse, dead in his chair as the paramedics arrive. I thought this was a weirdly bold (and potentially traumatizing) move for a Disney Channel movie.  We then cut to a flashback of the still-alive grandfather working on a pumpkin carving machine with his two grandchildren.  Between the early appearance of a corpse and pumpkin carving I had overly high expectations going in.

Things settled down quickly as the next thirty minutes were spent setting up the aforementioned complicated plot.  Dead grandfather was an inventor and former hardware store owner in a small New Englandy town called Steeplechase.  His adult son was embittered toward his father (I mean, really, REALLY bitter; he spent a lot of the movie complaining about his father) but his two grandkids loved him.  One of the grandkids is played by a young Kat Dennings, of Two Broke Girls and a few random movies fame.  I have never seen Kat Dennings play anything but a sarcastic wiseass and that’s what she’s doing here as well, though a milder pre-teen version.  She also engages in some of the worst, fakest on-screen running I’ve ever seen.  Meant to be running for her life in the woods at one point, she instead is laughing and sort of doing the chicken dance with her arms.  Even at a tender age, Kat Dennings was too steeped in irony to pretend to run for her life.

Eventually, after way too much set-up, the ghosts show up.  It’s hopelessly complicated, but in essence Grandpa’s ghost gets captured by a local evil spirit, and the kids track down some other ghosts to a limbo-like waystation for spirits.  The waystation is a total rip-off of the bureaucratic underworld seen in the movie Beetlejuice, down to the fact that the ghosts all appear in the same clothes they died in.  It’s an eclectic mix; spotted among the ghosts are cheerleaders, soccer players, a movie usher and a mime.  This movie would have you believe that people die constantly while engaged in their seemingly non-dangerous day jobs (which I don’t know—maybe that’s true?).

In short, the kids team up with a trio of ghosts who work at the waystation to rescue their grandfather’s spirit and usher him on to heaven (or potentially hell—this is never discussed in the movie.  The spirits just walk through a mirror into a sort of rainbow tunnel).  Erik Idle plays Coffinhead, a Revolutionary War ghost with bad teeth.  Kathy Najimy is the less-creatively-named Mariah, a ghost bride and sort of office manager.  And finally there’s Tommy Davidson as Jumper, a dead parachuter.  I’ve never seen Tommy Davidson in anything else before, but he was incredibly annoying in this.  He shouted all of his dialogue with an overload of sassiness.  Think of Chris Tucker’s character in Rush Hour, but even louder and sassier, and dressed as a parachuter.  Weirdly the ghosts only ever refer to themselves as “the Soul Patrol,” yet the movie is titled The Scream Team.

There is way, way more to the plot, involving a pyromaniac Pilgrim ghost with a thirst for revenge, a conspiring local businessman, stolen library books, an abandoned mine, the town’s first natural gas pipe system, and it goes on and on.  There is much running around with Erik Idle’s character disappearing every time the kids get into trouble, several run-ins with local cops, and the entire time the dad character is just bitching about not getting enough love and respect from his own father while his kids are fleeing for their lives (or in Kat Dennings’ case, chicken-dancing for her life) from a fireball-hurling spirit of vengeance.

Kathy Najimy (predictably, as she can do no wrong in my eyes) was the highlight, though of the three ghosts her role was the smallest.  She added some needed humor as the flustered office admin ghost who just wants to get on with her job, but at one point she morphs into a total bad-ass and has a supernatural showdown with the evil ghost and shoots ghost-lasers (or something) at him.  The special effects run the gamut; the shimmery, multi-colored flying ghosts are actually kind of cool, but there is also some laughably bad CGI fire throughout.

The other highlight of the movie is the Halloween décor and small-town festival.  Seriously, I love fictional small-town holiday festivals—call it the Stars Hollow effect.  Throughout the story the town is preparing for its annual Halloween festival, and we see truckloads of pumpkins and hay bales being delivered, and several trips are made to the most lavishly decorated library you’ll ever see (it even has a fireplace decked out with cobwebs, ravens and fake fall leaves).  The big finale takes place at the festival on Halloween, where the evil ghost hurls fireballs at the Ferris wheel and the locals burn a pumpkin-headed effigy.  As I wrote at the beginning of this overly long review, they certainly didn’t skimp on the Halloween décor.  Sadly they also didn’t skimp on the plot elements either, which were dizzying. 

The screenwriter (or writers) clearly had daddy issues since the movie essentially ends with the whiny dad sitting down with his father’s ghost for a heart to heart talk.  Those two kids risked life and limb for two hours to save their grandfather's immortal soul and then at the end when finally reunited with his ghost they say a quick goodbye and scurry upstairs to give their dad some private time to work out his feelings.  In the end, The Scream Team isn’t one of Disney Channel’s best Halloween offerings (I would give that award to Halloweentown), but it’s got a few things in its favor and makes for some good cheesy fun, with lots of nice glimpses at a New England town done up for Halloween.