You might be thinking this is going to be a positive review. “It’s an Adam Sandler movie. How could it be bad?” If you think that, you are very wrong. Before watching it, I had high expectations. The cast had so much potential that I think was wasted on a subpar Halloween movie that people won’t even want to watch next year.
The movie was released on Netflix as a Netflix Original on October 7. I was so ready to get in the mood for spooky season by watching this movie, but I was let down.
It takes place in Salem, Mass. on Halloween. Hubie DuBois is the main character played by Adam Sandler. He is the laughingstock of the whole town and gets picked on constantly. On Halloween, those who made fun of Hubie start disappearing, and it’s up to him to find out who is punishing them. Let me just say the culprit is the most cliché anticlimactic person in that movie. The ending ruined the whole thing. Sure it was wholesome—Hubie went from being the town clown to being their favorite person—but it was not a Halloween ending.
The cast was made up of almost every single actor/actress you could name. So many iconic Disney actors and actresses were also a part of this. To name a few: Kevin James, Noah Schnapp, Steve Buscemi, Karan Brar, and China Anne McClain. They even got Shaq. While they had a very talented, well known crew, it became so hard to keep track of the people. New characters just kept coming into the movie up until the very end. It didn’t put anybody in the spotlight, and nobody stood out as having amazing acting.
Their acting was also not as good as it usually is. It felt so weird to see some of them playing those characters. I feel like they took away all of the good acting to try and make it funnier.
One thing I disliked about this movie was that I could barely understand anything Adam Sandler said. Of course, it was his character and he was supposed to have a speech impediment, but it took away from the whole movie. Other than that Sandler was made to play Hubie. Not going to lie: it was funny at times, but that was off-putting considering it is a Halloween movie.
It might just be me and my love of horror movies, but this was so hard to sit through because it was painfully not scary. I just think that if you’re going to make a Halloween movie, you might as well give people a little bit of a scare. It felt like this movie was directed towards a younger audience; however, considering the cast, the movie is going to have a lot of older viewership as well. Watching it just seemed a little stupid.
Surprisingly, it’s still trending on Netflix: currently holding the number three spot at the time I’m writing this. It might have been because Halloween was right around the corner, but I believe after October 31, the views are going to go straight down. Most movies that take place around the holidays, people watch every year, but I genuinely don’t think that is going to happen with this movie.
After watching, I could not see myself going through that again. I was confused the whole time. Also, most of the good characters only stayed on for a short period of time.
I think the idea was good, but the execution was poor. It had so much potential, but that went down the drain immediately after they decided it was a good idea to produce a comedy movie for Halloween. Wrong holiday.
