Yeah, I really could have bet my soul on the fact I reviewed Halloweentown 1 and 2 years back but here we are. And I gotta say I think I liked this one better, so it's been about a year in movie time with Grandma Aggie living with Marnie and the family before stuff starts going sideways in Halloweentown where our magical heroes set forth to save the town once more from, actually despite the full title of Kalabar's Revenge there is no Kalabar but rather his son. I actually quite like how the tone is much more consistent, you get your villain introduction and the inciting incident quite quick and the stakes do feel raised from the last movie. The production values have went up considerably, the acting is mostly good, it's concisely told, and while it was made purely for young children you could see a bit of dramatic weight with Marnie's situation. She's a lot more proactive and no nonsense in this movie which makes sense because Kimberly Brown was a bit older so the character would be more mature too, and I genuinely could see potential with her dilemma of either staying in the mortal world or staying in Halloweentown permanently. Of course Debbie Reynolds is still quite fun but takes more of a back seat in the plot, yet it really wouldn't be Halloweentown without her. I don't have a grudge against Daniel Kountz as warlock in training Cal who is our villain, he needs to play this kind of smarmy evil bastard and that's what he does but I feel he needed more material to work with to make it a good performance. Sophie and Dylan don't even get put in the backseat, they're practically thrown in the trunk which does kinda suck a bit because I like how they go about the magic business with Dylan, it's not so much a lack of belief or matter of faith in magic that keeps him from using it it's just that he relies too much on logic and reality to use magic, you just gotta have an open mind about it. The effects are decent, and I actually really gotta give props to the set designers with how Halloweentown is sapped of all life and festivity, giving everything a cold lifeless grayscale color pallete to both architecture and citizens, it's really damn cool looking almost noir-esque. I never really progressed past Halloweentown 2 in the series, I may have caught a bit of Halloweentown High a very very long time ago, but this was kinda it for me. But hey who knows, we may touch base on the other two films in the future. I give this movie a solid 3 stars, 7.5/10, and ohhh the things we will talk about next month. Bye for now...
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