I was about to write a post about how I’m not sure I should participate in NaBloPoMo, but then I looked back at my post for the first day of last year’s NaBloPoMo. And I realized that all of my fears from last year are exactly the same as my fears for this year which means:
a. My fears are totally unrelated to experience
and
b. If I did it last year, I can do it again this year!
Plus, I want a new 2015 badge. Okay, let’s do this!
Double, Double Toil and Trouble is a movie about two little girls who have to undo an evil spell on Halloween night. It involves a moonstone and Cloris Leachman.
Other than that, there are two very important things you should know about this movie:
I know it’s just a kids movie but here is a list of things that still creep me out in this movie:
This is a two-part Halloween episode. That’s serious business. But Amazon lied to me and told me Part II was really part I. So what follows is Part II plus what I’ve filled in from Part I:
Carlton and Will have some kind of a bet over who can be the first to find a date for Hillary’s Halloween party. This all boils down to them fighting over the same girl. That feels pretty unrealistic, but we’ll go with it. This mostly consists of them insulting each other in front of this poor girl who should not be considering either one of them at this point. Carlton even uses the R word as an insult (my, how far we have come since the 90’s).
Meanwhile, Hillary has been falsely arrested for shoplifting while she and the rest of the family attempt to find Halloween costumes. It seems pretty ridiculous that fashionista Hillary would wait until the day of a party to find an outfit, but whatever.
Will and Carlton have reached a stalemate in trying to win this girl’s affections, so they start flat-out lying to her. Will describes a “typical” night with him, which involves hanging out with Bo Jackson and Heavy D. Plus, Malcolm Jamal-Warner calls him from the set of The Cosby Show and asks for dating advice. Oh and then Quincy Jones shows up and begs him to sing on a track. But the Fresh Prince is too busy, so he calls his buddy Al B. Shure to fill in for him. Just as Al B. Shure and Quincy Jones are leaving, they talk about how they have to be sure not to miss A Different World–which is so convenient because Kadeem Hardison just happens to be hanging out at Will’s house!
Carlton can’t follow Will’s story at all, so he’s just like “come to the party with me.” And the girl is like well, I’m just more attracted to Carlton. So there you have it. Carlton won out over Will for like the one time ever in history. They all head to the party, and Hillary (who has been released from mall-jail) has invited the mall cop to party with them. Everything seems great for Carlton and crappy for Will (he invited a waitress from the mall to be his date, but she hasn’t shown up). But Carlton can’t really win anything, so it turns out that his date is actually the shoplifter that the mall cop was searching for. She’s also a kleptomaniac who was about to rob them out of house and home.
And then Will’s date shows up as this gorgeous, perfect, real-life but also dressed-up as Cinderella. She lives in Encino with her step-mother and step-sisters. They have a great time and Carlton is miserable. Balance is restored to the Fresh Prince’s world. But the story isn’t over yet. A group of trick-or-treaters show up after they’ve run out of candy. They’re so late because they’ve been watching Matlock. So Will just invites a random group of children into his home and tells them a “scary story” about the “Bel-Air Beast,” which is clearly a description of Carlton. Then all of the children run from the house when Carlton walks into the room. Poor guy, he must have developed some serious self-esteem issues when Will moved-in.
Halloween Lesson: Don’t pick up randos at the mall, be careful not to be mistaken for a shoplifter–and if you’re going to a 90’s Halloween Party, always remember the best costume is grapes.
Things start off ominously in this episode of The Baby-Sitters Club. There’s a sketchy haunted house and Claudia is being super cryptic about something. Actually, it turns out she’s failing out of middle school. Her mom’s set her up with a tutor but she’s going to have to miss out on some BSC meetings. No big deal though, she can just explain the situation to her friends.
Except she doesn’t plan on doing that, she makes some big dramatic deal out of this and says, “I can’t live without The Baby-Sitters Club and The Baby-Sitters Club can’t live without me.” Geez.
Anyway, Dawn and Stacey end up babysitting for this kid who is obsessed with dinosaur fossils. He wants to go hunt bones in the backyard because there are a lot of them by Mrs. Slade’s house. Dawn and Stacey are like wtf?? And this kid is just like, “She’s a witch lady. She talks to animals and turns people into dogs.”
So the baby-sitters decide to take the kids outside to investigate. Yep, that’s right, the people you trust to keep your children safe while you are at the mall are taking them on a literal witch hunt. They evacuate the woods when they find a sick looking dog and a hear strange noises coming from the general vicinity of Ms. Slade’s house.
Then they go to the hardware store to meet the other babysitters! “I just love hardware stores,” Stacey says, “next to Bloomingdale’s there’s no place I’d rather be.” Uh, yeah. Okay. As it turns out, Mrs. Slade is also shopping in the hardware store. She’s purchasing some really creepy stuff too: a lantern (for working late at night) and a shovel (for digging deep). I mean I think it’s pretty obvious that she’s burying bodies in the night.
That night at their spooky sleepover party, they all tell stories about the scariest thing that has ever happened to them. Mallory’s story is about how she was walking home with a group in the woods and THEY ALL LEFT HER to take the road instead. Seriously, I wonder if they make her super sad intentionally.
Then they start talking about how creepy Mrs. Slade is and Claudia tells them all that her behavior is probably perfectly normal. When they bring up the shovel incident, Claudia says, “so she gardens,” and Dawn calls that the “dumbest thing [she’s] ever heard.” Well, no, it’s definitely the only intelligent thing anyone has said about this poor woman. But Claudia gets her feelings her and storms off. They’re all like geez, I wish I knew what was wrong with her! And I’m just wondering how NONE of them have managed to notice that Claudia has been reading a textbook for the entire duration of this slumber party. They are terrible detectives.
Then Stacey goes back to babysit for fossil kid. This time she has Mary Anne with her. Fossil kid is all like hey look, I can see Mrs. Slade through my telescope! And Stacey is all like,” it’s not nice to spy on people,” but then she pushes him out of the way so she can spy on Mrs. Slade herself. She sees Claudia through the telescope with Mrs. Slade. Mrs. Slade is rubbing some kind of herb on their faces, and even I have to admit that’s weird.
Stacey calls Dawn to get the BSC over to the Slade house to rescue Claudia. Basically, their plan consists of Stacey telling Mrs. Slade that there is a wounded dog in the woods. So Mrs. Slade is going to go looking for the dog, and the girls will seize that opportunity to “rescue” Claudia. Well, this seems extraordinarily cruel but okay.
So the BSC goes out looking for Mrs. Slade. They’re calling for her and nothing works, so then Claudia has a great idea. “I bet she’ll hear us if we bark like dogs.” So then they all howl and it works. Omg. This is the weirdest episode ever. Then they all have to tell her that they thought she was a witch and that they lied about the dog. But it wasn’t a total loss because Mrs. Slade found a bird who needs to have his wing mended.
Halloween Lesson: Don’t call old ladies witches. That’s like breaking a cardinal rule of feminism or something.
Halloween is a BIG deal to the Taylor family. Tim and Al prank each other on Tool Time and the Taylors prank each other around the house. Basically, they all have to spend the entire month of October looking over their shoulders.
After Randy and Brad freak their mom out by preparing dinner a.k.a. a gory-severed head (not real, don’t worry), some creepy man shows up at the door. He hints at an awful incident that happened when he lived in the house and wants to see “the basement,” which is now Randy’s room. Brad thinks it’s just their parents trying to get even with them, but Randy is not so sure.
They decide to talk to Wilson. If Wilson knows about “the incident” then it’s true. If he does not, then their parents are playing them. While Randy and Brad are walking over to Wilson’s, Jill and Tim pay off the creepy man. It turns out that Brad and Randy have been picking on Mark AGAIN and they’re enacting revenge.
Wilson plays along and gives them this awful story about how the creepy man was long-ago suspected of killing his brother, Ezekiel. However, it’s also possible that Ezekiel simply ran away. Either way, the creepy dude was locked away in a mental institution. Wilson hints that he should still be there but Randy and Brad tell him that he’s out and trying to get a look at their basement.
Wilson even has a fake newspaper article from the “time of the incident,” suggesting that Ezekial is buried in the basement. But Al shows up at the Taylor home and sees the boys reading the newspaper. Al’s never in on any of the secrets, so he innocently identifies Larry (aka Creepy man) as “your dad’s Halloween guy,” having met him earlier at Tool Time.
So now Brad and Randy are in the revenge business, and they want to bring Al into the fold. With Al on their time, Brady and Randy start weaving a web of intricate lies. Al goes to Jill and Tim “concerned” that Randy is now terrified of the basement. In the meantime, Brad is trying to make Randy look like he’s crying by squirting Visine in his eyes. In the process, he pokes him in the eye with the bottle, so the tears quickly become real.
Then Larry shows up at the house again and he’s pissed because Jill & Tim didn’t pay him the full amount for his services. He looks like he’s ready to destroy Brad and Randy over $100 that they don’t have, so they head up to the attack to look for their parents secret money stash. (But he’s playing them again.)
Jill and Tim have basically turned the attic into a haunted house. Just when Randy and Brad start to get really jumpy, Jill/Tim/Mark reveals themselves as the ultimate prank victors. And Larry walks up the attic stairs to let the boys know he wasn’t really plotting to shake them down for $100.Then Al gets them back by trapping them all in the attic. Good for Al. Al needed a win.
Halloween Lesson: The family that pranks together stays together. (Unless you’re a Brady. Then that shit is strictly forbidden.)
It’s Halloween-time in the Brady home and the two youngest Brady girls are certain they’ve seen a ghost. And they insist that they heard it in the attic too. I feel like they really should be more skeptical since they all worked together to make their house seem haunted a few years earlier.
Mom & Dad Brady head up to the attic to investigate and discover a rocking chair blown by the wind coming through an open window. (Hence the “ghost noises”). Having solved the mystery, they send the girls back go bed. Mom kisses Cindy goodnight and Dad kisses Marcia. No one kisses Jan.
Carol & Mike over-hear the boys laughing in their room down the hall, and realize who the “ghost” is, but you know kids will be kids so who gives a crap. Marcia never believed the ghost was real and has already deduced that the boys are to blame. So she encourages the girls to sneak around and look for evidence. They find a slide projector and discover that they have a slide of one of the boys wearing a sheet. Okay, so Jan and Cindy aren’t so dumb. I mean a slide projection in the middle of the night would be pretty creepy.
So the next night at dinner, the girls trick the boys into spending the night in the attic. They bet their allowance that the attic is haunted, and of course the boys accept the bet–thinking that the girls are idiots. Mom and Dad Brady permit this to happen because they’re always 2 steps ahead of their children and figure the girls are plotting to get even. The Bradys love some good, healthy plotting.
So the girls records some creepy voice over stuff and make some plastic ghost thing hover around the attic. Bobby and Peter are totally freaked out and evacuate the attic, thus losing the bet. Only by that time Bobby and Peter are so scared, they don’t even care. They’re worried that Greg is dead because he didn’t follow them out of the attic.
But Mom and Dad Brady have realized that this has gone to far and they all head up into the attic to discover that Greg has figured out the girls’ trick. The Brady parents ban any further pranking, but they do let the girls keep the boys allowances. That seems pretty fair since the boys started this whole thing and they figured the whole time that the girls would prank them back.
So then they all join forces and decide to scare Alice. This just goes to show that the Brady kids are really total jerks. This woman cooks for them, cleans up after them, gives them prime life advice, and–in Jan’s case–saved her from near certain depression by showing her even an iota of attention. Basically, Alice is a freaking saint and this children are assholes.
But don’t worry, they get what they deserve. They screw up the timing so it’s their parents who arrive home first, not Alice. Of course, they see through this shenanigan immediately but it’s very dark in the house, so they have to track down the kids. Mrs. Brady stupidly leaves her prize-winning bust of Mr. Brady’s head on that partial wall divider that goes around the back of their couch, dividing the living room from the entry way. Well, to be fair the house is super dark–so maybe she thinks it’s safest where she knows she won’t trip and fall while carrying it.
The only problem with that plan is that Alice arrives home while the lights are still out and thinks a creepy man is sitting on the Brady’s couch. So she shatters the bust to pieces with one swift blow to the back of the bust’s head. Then the Brady kids learn their lesson because they’re not actually total assholes.
Halloween Lesson: If you have nothing better to do with your time then terrorize your housekeeper/friend then you’re a jerk. It’s Halloween. Be more inventive.
For witches Halloween is a high holy day, obvi. Hilda and Zelda start off the day by singing “Halloween Carols” like “Have a Jolly Jolly Jolly Halloween.” They’re really fun songs and if they were real and had more verses, I would go Halloween Caroling with this material. This is the first season so Sabrina is really lame about being a witch. She’s not even into Halloween.
But it just so happens that Harvey is having a Halloween party. Of course, she wants to go but Halloween is a high holy day, remember? And those are meant to be spent with family. So Sabrina does the only reasonable thing possible: she clones herself so she can be in two places at once. She wants her double to be really friendly and likeable, so she only equips her with phrases like “That is so true”and “I’d love to.”
Double Sabrina goes to Harvey’s party while real Sabrina goes to a Halloween party in the Other Realm. I’d have to say that Sabrina got this backwards and she should have sent the double to the other realms, but Hilda tries to send a double to the other realm and Zelda sees straight through it. So it looks like Sabrina made the right choice.
Or maybe not. Real-Sabrina is forced to sit a the kid’s table with her cousin, Amanda (played by Melissa Joan Hart’s real life sister). Amanda is a spoiled brat who puts people she doesn’t like in jars (with air holes luckily). It doesn’t take long for Sabrina to become her latest victim. Oh yeah and things aren’t going to great for clone Sabrina either. She’s agreed to streak to liven up the party. Clone Sabrina has no problem with this, but I have to assume that real Sabrina will. Harvey tries to talk Clone Sabrina out of streaking, but she can only utter like 3 sentences, so he just walks away confused and frustrated.
But Sabrina does get a cool gift from her aunts for Halloween. (It’s basically like Christmas in the witch world, I think.) She gets something called a “reanimation” and is allowed to spend 30 minutes with the deceased-person of her choice. Kinda creepy sounding, I know. But she chooses her grandmother and her grandma looks lovely and normal and not at all corpse-like. It’s really a sweet concept.
After they get home from the family party, Sabrina decides to skip the rest of Harvey’s party and stay-in to read letters from her grandmother instead. But Salem warns her not to “leave a double running around.” Sabrina gets to the house right at the same time that Clone Sabrina is streaking, which leaves everyone in the party thinking that Libby is the streaker (since she’s outside with Clone Sabrina). Libby is a jerk, but I kind of do feel bad for her here.
Halloween Lesson: Don’t suggest that other people streak unless you’re willing to do it yourself.
Corey & Topanga are in the midst of a trial-separation and Shawn is in the middle of their dispute. Meanwhile, a janitor straight out of Tales from the Crypt enters the room to empty the trash. He then does some creepy finger-pointing (at Feeny, maybe? I’m not sure). Then he leaves without saying a word.
Cory, Shawn, Topanga, Angela, and some dude named Kenny all get detention for being disruptive in class, but Feeny leaves them alone in the room because he doesn’t want to be stuck in detention too. However, he tells them that they are still “being watched.” Shawn tries to leave immediately after Feeny, but discovers they have all been locked in the classroom.
Then the creepy janitor appears again. Instead of quietly sitting in their seats and waiting for him to pass like normal, sane humans, Shawn and Cory decide to ask him to unlock the door. He just holds up the keys, smiles, and turns away. Then the pull down map on the board (remember those? do schools still have those or is everything on the internet now?) scrolls up to reveal “NO ONE GETS OUT ALIVE” written in blood on the blackboard.
Shawn tells the group that Feeny must be trying to pull a prank on them. He says it’s just like all of the horror movies he’s seen, and then starts to list the rules of horror movies like the video store guy in Scream did. He points out that Kenny will have to be the first victim. The tragedy of being on the outside of the clique–sorry, buddy.
But then Jack and Eric show up and open the door. No one asks how they managed to unlock it. I feel like that’s a really important question, but no one seems to care. Eric tells them that he and Jack decided to come to the high school to play basketball–uh, okay–and then they discovered that there was blood coming out of the locker room showers. Shawn says this is just like that classic horror film “Blood in the Showers,” and they decide that Feeny is torturing them with horror movie antics because detention isn’t scary anymore.
Then the lights go out and someone murders Kenny in like 1.5 seconds. That pretty much can only mean that one of our favorite cast members is a psychopath (probably the one standing closest to him) because who else could possible have had that opportunity? But he was also murdered with a pencil to the forehead, so I guess we’re assuming a lot of things are possible in this universe.
But Shawn still says it’s all just a prank. Only, Feeny ends up dead too. Wait. What? NO. Ugh, this is all Shawn’s fault. He made Feeny was the first suspect, which makes him a red herring, which makes him the most likely to die. Then we find out which of the group are virgins because Shawn says they’re the only ones who will survive. (FYI Cory & Topanga are safe, duh. Shawn says “I’ll get as sick as you can get without actually dying” and Jack & Eric are dead. Angela doesn’t comment.)
Then Topanga yells at Shawn and says that he was wrong about Feeny, so he’s probably wrong about this entire thing. And Sean is all like, “You were wrong to break up with Cory.” OMG, Shawn, people are DYING. Give the teen romance crap a break for 2 seconds! Then he blames her for the entire horrific event saying that none of this happened when she and Cory were dating, ergo John Adams High turns into a horror movie bloodbath when they’re not together. Good to know the entire balance of the universe is in the hands of two neurotic teenagers.
When the janitor ends up dead too, the group has to accept that the killer is one of them (which I knew ten minutes ago, geez.) But Topanga insists that there must be someone else in the building, so they leave Eric out as guard/bait while the rest of them hide in the classroom. Just then, Jennifer Love Hewitt shows up and she and Eric make out. (This was back when they were dating in real life.)
Then the pay phone rings and Jack answers it. It’s the ghost face killer from Scream! And poor Jack is just as friendly and innocent as Drew, answering the creepy questions all friendly like. Then they all split up, to lower the chances of the killer finding them all at once. Then Jennifer Love Hewitt dies when the killer pushes like five books at her. These people are so fragile. But then Eric dies the same way!
Angela and Jack die next, when the killer pushes them out of a window. Now only Cory, Topanga, and Shawn are left facing the killer. Shawn unmasks him and discovers his own face is under the mask. It’s like super trippy. Clearly, this is all just a dream. But Shawn’s obviously really enmeshed with Cory & Topanga. I guess we already knew that though. Also, that means that Shawn was dreaming about who out of his friends is/is not a virgin. The end!
Halloween Lesson: Don’t ever get so involved in your friends’ relationship that it haunts your dreams.
Hello, Very Special Readers! That spooky time of year is upon us once more. Tonight, I will be living a private horror of my own, as I begrudgingly attend an office party. It’s one of those things you’re “invited” to but it’s a tacit mandatory attendance kind of thing.
Alas, at least I have Halloweek to look forward to. Yes, that’s my very clever phrase to describe 7 days of Halloween Specials. Maybe, I’ll even be brave enough to do another Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode. But don’t get your hopes up. Last year I used a gif from the Stevil episode of Family Matters to announce Halloweek, but then it took me an entire year to actually gather up the courage to watch it.
I’m still trying to recover from my recent viewing of Scream, so I’ll probably stay away from the really scary stuff. But I can promise you Boy Meets World. And maybe the Baby-Sitters Club. Ahhh, I’m giving myself away! Okay, bye! No more updates so you’ll just have to stay tuned and read for yourself.
Okay, so I know I ragged on Netflix the other day, but honestly I do love them. They’ve helped me cut the cable cord and for that I’ll always be immensely grateful. But lately, I’ve been trying to give Amazon’s original programing a chance too. I really enjoyed Transparent, so I thought I would give Red Oaks a whirl.
Red Oaks is a coming-of-age summer tale about a suburban college kid. It’s a story you’ve heard 200 times before, but the characters are intriguing and the writing is pretty funny. Jennifer Grey is in it and I’ll love her forever even with her new weird-nose. Also, this show is pretty. The clothes have fantastic colors and the hair is fun. They even have one character with a Molly Ringwald cut (but she throws more of an Ally Sheedy vibe). Suffice it to say, it’s not all big perms.
While I think you should check the whole-thing out, the 7th episode of the season really sings to me. And while it’s not a bottle episode, it does stand a bit alone from the rest of the series so I think I can share it with you without too many spoilers.
David (played by Craig Roberts who I’ve only ever seen in this show) is with his family at one of those Benihana type restaurants, celebrating his father’s birthday. (Dad is played by Richard Kind, who you’ve probably seen in literally everything but most recently Inside Out where he made everyone cry in his riveting performance as Bing-Bong). Things get weird when the sample some Asian liquor.
Pretty earlier on in the series (like first 10 minutes) we learn that David’s parents are in a loveless marriage, and it quickly becomes apparent that many of David’s current decisions are based not wanting his parents’ future. So when I read the episode description for “Body Swap” and realized that David and his father would literally be swapping bodies, I rolled my eyes. Come on! We’ve seen this so many times since the original (and amazing) Freaky Friday. The 80’s were full of lame body/brain switching: Like Father Like Son, Vice Versa, 18 Again, and even to some-extent Dream a Little Dream and Big.
But then I realized that this over-inundation of fish-out-of-water films is exactly why this show decided to step outside of their standard-fare. It doesn’t get more meta than literally transforming into the type of dramady popular in the time period of your show within the context of your show. It’s kind of like, well maybe there were so many of these movies in the 80’s because this was a real problem.
Or for those of you who don’t want to read so deeply into meta-think, this is a really great pastiche. This body-swap isn’t played for laughs…at least not anymore-so than the natural humor this situation creates for the viewer. This isn’t a gimmick and in some ways it gets more real than any of those 80’s movies ever could have. The major conflict of the episode turns out to be that David’s parents’ marriage therapists have instructed them to “Go home. Turn off the TV. Pour some wine. Light a scented candle. And make beautiful, sweet love.” Ick. So that’s the worst possible thing I can imaging happening in a body-swap situation.
So David and his dad are left scrambling to track down a bottle of the weird Japanese liquor made of “humpback” that they drank the night before swapping bodies. Of course, they gain a greater understanding of one-another along they way. (And right when they gain that understanding, the man who originally gave them the liquor mysteriously appears again…)
In 25-minutes Red Oaks fully steps into an 80’s movie trope without sabotaging the original narrative it is establishing for itself. With all of these new quirky, yet heartfelt comedy-dramas, it’s hard to determine what will be a cool show and what will try too hard (looking at you, Scream Queens). But effectively pulling off a pastiche to an entire sub-genre of films is a pretty good sign. It means the writers are more self aware of their show, their context, and their viewers than the first few episodes could demonstrate. And that’s a really, really good sign.
P.S. this episode was directed by Amy Heckerling, so I don’t know how to any further convince you of it’s excellence.
The Very Special Blog 