The Fox Family made-for-TV movie When Good Ghouls Go Bad has long been on my “To Watch” list for
many reasons. It’s based on a book
by R.L. Stine, the 90s horror maestro.
It stars Christopher Lloyd, of Back
to the Future and Clue fame. And, judging by the few snippets I was
able to view online, it’s brimming with Halloween cheer. Despite my desire to see it, it’s been
a long wait. It’s available for
sale on DVD but I wanted to watch it at least once before adding it to my permanent
collection, and it apparently never airs on TV anymore. Luckily some kind soul put the whole
thing up on YouTube and it was my first movie pick of the 2015 Halloween
season.
I’m happy to report that it didn’t disappoint! It never reaches the brilliance of Hocus Pocus (nothing does, but both
movies both have “death by school kiln” scenes) or even the campy fun of Halloweentown, but it hit all of the
holiday sweet spots. The plot gets
complicated, but I’ll do my best to keep recap it quickly: tween Danny and his dad
move back to the small town that’s home to both Danny’s grandfather and the
ailing family chocolate factory.
While Danny’s dad ignores him while trying to save the family business,
Danny bonds with his fun-loving grandpa (played by Christopher Lloyd), who insists that everyone, even Danny, call him Uncle Fred.
Danny soon learns that Halloween is forbidden in the town
due to an incident years earlier involving a Goth kid who was accidentally
killed in the school kiln and threatened revenge if the holiday is ever celebrated. The local football
coach and his bully son fanatically enforce the rules, but a series of bizarre
events quickly upsets the status quo.
In short order Uncle Fred is killed when a mysterious pile of pumpkins
falls on him, then comes back as a friendly zombie to help Danny uncover why
Halloween decorations keep appearing all over town. Danny, his local girl love interest, and zombie Uncle Fred
soon run afoul of a host of zombies and angry townspeople and uncover a
conspiracy about the real events surrounding the infamous Curtis Danko’s death.
That’s about as concise as I can manage, and I’m leaving
out a lot, including weird subplots about German investors, Danny’s dad’s own love interest, magical fireflies, a secret haunted house run by the local kids, an evil
statue, and the list goes on and on.
The story isn’t the movie’s greatest strength, but it somehow all makes
sense in the end.
Christopher Lloyd can bring gravitas to any situation or dialogue and he anchors the whole thing with a sense of fun. There are a lot of interesting supporting
characters, like Danny’s dad’s kooky secretary, the bully’s mom, and the
befuddled mayor and his wife. At
first I was confused by Danny’s love interest, Dayna. I thought maybe her dialogue was all dubbed, because
something was definitely off every time she spoke. A little internet research revealed that the actress is
Australian, and she did a bad job trying to disguise her accent. The result is a very weird, very
distracting cadence. The movie
itself, set in small-town middle America, was shot in Australia but if there
were other covert Aussies actors in the cast they did a much better job of keeping their
accents at bay.
The Halloween visuals are plentiful. One of the plot points is that elaborate
Halloween decorations keep mysteriously appearing throughout the town, so there
lots of shots of lavish holiday décor.
The kids also have the aforementioned secret haunted house,
to which they smuggled all of the town’s banned Halloween stuff. An orange Volkswagen bug even gets
done-up as a jack-o-lantern and a very cool cemetery makes repeat appearances.
What I wasn’t expecting were a few surprisingly profound
moments thrown in amid the silliness.
The first such moment occurs when Danny speaks to Dayna after his grandfather’s
funeral. She delivers a beautiful
monologue on how the idea of him decomposing in his grave is actually a
beautiful thing, a return to the earth, and so on. (It sounds better when delivered in her weird Aussie-US
warble.) The ending of the movie is
also surprisingly moving, with the assembled zombies engaging in a beautiful
danse macabre in the graveyard, slowly swirling into dust and clouds.
Reading up on the movie afterward revealed a real-life tragedy
linked to it. The actor who played
Danny went missing in 2006 at the age of 18. He’s never been found after leaving a poker game with
friends. It definitely casts a
pall over the proceedings, knowing the grim fate of its child star, but as I
said the movie actually has a surprisingly deep and nuanced view of death that
you wouldn’t expect from a made-for-TV Halloween movie aimed at kids. Perhaps it's due to the tragic
circumstances of its star that When Good
Ghouls Go Bad isn’t in heavy rotation every Halloween, but it has a lot
going for it and is definitely worth seeking out.
