FILM FOCUS: MOM'S GOT A DATE WITH A VAMPIRE

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!