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.
