This
past summer the Disney Channel ran a marathon of all of their made-for-TV
movies. Of course I recorded and
stockpiled all of the holiday-themed ones, and now that it’s October I’m finally
able to start watching them. I love a
good Disney Channel original movie (or rather a so-bad-it’s-good movie), but I
actually haven’t seen as many of these as I’d presumed. Rather I just feel like I’ve seen them all, probably due to absorbing countless
commercials for them over the years while watching other shows. So while I was familiar with Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire, this
was my first time actually watching it.
The
big draw here for me aside from the Halloween theme was Caroline Rhea, who I
loved in her role as Aunt Hilda in Sabrina
the Teenage Witch. And I just find
her generally likeable, and enjoy that she can never hide her Canadian accent
no matter the role she may be playing.
The rest of the cast is impressive as well: Mr. Sheffield (Charles Shaughnessy)
from The Nanny plays the titular vampire,
while the dad (Robert Carradine) from Lizzie
McGuire plays a vampire hunter.
I’ll
try to keep the plot recap to a minimum: Caroline Rhea is a harried single mom
with three kids. The two older kids answer
a personal ad on their mom’s behalf, figuring if she’s out on a date they’ll be
free to sneak themselves. Of course,
just by reading the title of the thing you know Mom’s date turns out to be a
vampire and so the kids and a semi-helpful vampire hunter must rescue her, all
in the course of one night.
At a
trim hour and a half (with commercials) this still lagged a bit, as the kids
chased Mom and her vampire date around town, from a restaurant to a rockabilly
dance club (more on that soon!), a harvest festival and then finally a lakeside
mansion. Of course the ending is a happy
one, with Mom using the power of maternal love to break out her trance just in
time to save her kids and seal the vampire back in his coffin. The real fun here is in the Halloween
details, which aren’t as omnipresent as I’d hoped. But there are still lots of little Halloweeny
things to appreciate, so let’s delve in.
By
far the best scene of the entire movie was when Mom and the kids first met Mr.
Vampire (aka Wolfsbane aka Dimitri) in a supermarket. Sounds tame, I know, but this is THE GREATEST
SUPERMARKET EVER. Inside and out it is
decorated to the max, mostly with these beloved Halloween die-cuts that my
family also had when I was a kid. You
know the ones I’m talking about:
I had
such fun identifying these decorations throughout the supermarket scene, and besides
die-cuts galore the place boasted hay bales, jack-o-lanterns and a display of “Frankenstein
cereal” (because Franken Berry is trademarked):
When I was a kid going to the supermarket around Halloween and Christmas
was such a treat, seeing all of the decorations and special displays. I feel like stores don’t go as all out as
they once did, and I miss those life-size cardboard cut-outs of Elvira hawking
root beer or faux red-brick cardboard fireplaces at Christmastime. This scene really made the movie for me,
especially since outside of the supermarket scene the Halloween decorations
were basically null. There was nary a
pumpkin on a porch for the rest of the movie, making me wonder if they decided
to throw in the Halloween theme at the last minute, for just this one scene.
Which
isn’t to say there wasn’t plenty of spooky stuff, because there was. One of the kids is obsessed with a band
called the Headless Horsemen, and wears a nifty Headless Horseman tee-shirt
throughout (at one point it’s revealed his closet is nothing but this same
tee-shirt in different shades).
Mom and
Mr. Vampire have dinner at Renfield’s, a nice shout-out to the character of the
same name in the original Dracula
novel. The Harvest Festival scene,
however, despite its promising name, fell far short of the one portrayed on Parks & Recreation. Aside from reusing some of the same hay bales
and jack-o-lanterns seen in the supermarket, it was just a bunch of non-descript
carnival rides and mud. I noticed that
the ground was basically one giant puddle, and some quick internet research
revealed the movie was filmed in Canada and they mostly couldn’t show the
actors’ feet due to the mud and water.
There’s
one last thing worth discussing about Mom’s
Got a Date with a Vampire, and that’s the aforementioned rockabilly dance
club scene. For the unfamiliar, rockabilly
is sort of a countryish 50s rock subgenre.
First off, a rockabilly dance club is a really random thing to have in a
Disney Channel movie aimed at preteens.
The scene featured a real-life rockabilly band called The Royal Crowns,
and they play several songs. Part of Mom’s
backstory is that she was once a singer in a band, so she ends up stage to
sing. I’ve never known Caroline Rhea to
sing in any of her roles, so I was surprised—until she started singing in a
totally different woman’s voice. I mean,
they didn’t even try to find someone who sounds remotely like Caroline
Rhea. It’s definitely up there as one of
the worst dubbed scenes I’ve seen (and since I watch a lot of made-for-TV and
B-movies, I’ve seen some doozies over the years). But it’s exactly cheesy scenes like these
that make this type of movie so much fun.
So
while this could have been a lot heavier on the Halloween theme, there’s a lot
of fun to be had, especially if, like me, you’re a fan of 90s sitcom stars,
supermarket decorations and rockabilly.
Rock
on, Mom!
