Halloween isn’t just for us unstable horror fanatics, it’s also for kids. At least that’s what my kids keep telling me, probably in an attempt to get me to watch things like Spooky Buddies. I think I’ve actually watched all the Buddies films now so it was only natural to add this one to the mix.
Since the kids won’t sit down and watch the director’s cut of Mimic, we put Spooky Buddies on instead. This time around we follow the Buddies on Halloween night as they try to stop an evil warlock (Harland Williams) and the Halloween Hound (Diedrich Bader) from opening a portal and releasing all the evil spirits trapped inside.
If I learned one thing from this movie, it’s that 88 minutes can seem like a very long time.
Obviously Disney didn’t make this film for me, although I do find all those puppies very cute. The stereotypes that they put them in aren’t as cute though. The girl dog is prissy, there’s a dog who likes to eat a lot, a smart dog, a dirty dog, and a gangster dog. Well, the dog is as gangster as you can be growing up in an upper middle class area. Each dog has an owner which is a reflection of who they are. That makes the gangster dog even more painful as his owner, Billy (Skyler Gisondo), tells his mom that she’s ‘ruining his street cred’. Who checks these scripts? Sorry kid, you didn’t have any street cred to begin with.
The Buddies. They have names but you don't care and neither do I.
There’s almost no point in talking about the story. Adults will hate it and kids will love it, at least that’s how it works around here. The animals are all very cute and they’re all dressed up in Halloween costumes which only adds to the cute factor. I was also impressed by the Halloween Hound who looked pretty cool. He’s probably about as scary as you’re going to get for a direct to DVD flick from Disney. While all the animals are cute and can act as well as animals can act, the humans were seriously lacking. All the adults in the film were obnoxious. I’m assuming this is how they set it up so the kids are the real heroes of the piece. The adults couldn’t put two and two together if you handed them a four. Despite every adult being stupid and annoying, Disney still didn’t kill any moms.
I actually thought the Halloween Hound was pretty cool.
Now, I wasn’t exactly expecting the story to blow my mind and when I saw the running time was something like 88 minutes, I figured this would be an easy one to sit through. Apparently I was wrong. It seemed like the movie should have ended about four times before it actually did. Everything about the film just dragged and dragged and dragged. Even the ghost dog in the movie moved about slowly. He’s a ghost, how come he can’t go fast? You’d think he was a zombie.
It’s slow. Everything about the movie is slow. The pace is slow, the ghost is slow, the warlock is slow, this review is slow. It’s nice that there’s some other options when it comes to Halloween films for my kids but they could have cut this down to an hour special and nobody would have noticed. Well, I would have noticed because it would have ended when I wanted it to and not when it actually did.
In the shadows – Will
