The Night Before Halloween

I don't know if executives bother to read scripts anymore. How could this film have gotten green-lit? The characters are half dimensional, the story doesn't make any sense, everything happens very conveniently for the plot to unfold in a tired, uninteresting, and convoluted way. No tension, no suspense, nothing of real interest at all. Lots of misplaced jump scares, yet the film has absolutely no atmosphere which is essential for a horror film. I give credit to the actors for doing what they could with an exceptionally poorly executed, amateurish script. The dialogue is ridiculously bad. The worst part is that there is no catalyst to invoke the villain, who as it turns out is not very scary at all. SyFy has got to pick up their game. This is garbage.

Junk like this plays better on some YouTube channel.

It's ok, but slow and confusing kinda tbh. Wouldn't watch it again. Stupid ending too

When a prank inadvertently kills someone, a group of friends attempting to get away with the crime find themselves stalked one year later by a strange being that's part of a curse against them and they must find a way to stop the deadly creature from taking them all out.

This here turned out to be quite a problematic offering. The vast majority of the problems with this one lies in the fact that there's just not a whole lot of work done here to make the main group likable enough to follow them. The concept of their initial prank is so ludicrous and stupid that it really boggles the mind what it was supposed to accomplish, and then to top it off the idea of them abandoning the whole affair in light of the accident the way they do so here by actually figuring on letting a friend die instead of trying to save her merely to save themselves makes them out as utterly despicable and deplorable so that they deserve the fate that befalls them. How easily they get coerced into going along with it isn't all that much better, and the fact that it almost lets them get away with the accident when a simple matter of innocent explanation all could've saved themselves the trouble and kept themselves from revealing what could've happened would have made the story hold together a lot stronger. There's also the fact that the film here presents itself as such an utter cliché in the manner of how the creature goes about being unleashed against the group which doesn't make any sense why they would need to carry out a dangerous action here in order to let the creature get involved. As well as some typically spotty CGI used in the concept of the flies, these here are what really hold this back even with a few rather decent elements. One of the stronger parts to this one is the actual attack scenes which are some of the most fun and enjoyable parts of this one with the opening prank resulting in a frantic chase down the streets trying to stop them, their first encounter in the hospital room where the creature assembles as flies to confront them in the vicinity of the bedridden-witness and the stellar scenes in the parking lot where they get arrested only to get confronted by the creature again and leads into the crazy encounter at the police station which is a strong highlight series of confrontations here. Even the fun scenes in the later half, detailing their battle in the warehouse that's quite detailed and much more action-packed than anything else in the film while managing to fill in the blanks of one of the biggest unresolved plot-points so far and becomes a spectacular twist ending as well. These here really manage to hold this one up although a vast majority of it's flaws do hold it back.

Rated Unrated/R: Graphic Violence and Language.

Scyfy doesn't do horror very often and on the rare occasion they do they don't have the habit of producing anything even remotely watchable.

Bailee Madison stars in this messy little tale which though has an explained concept (As terrible as it is) it doesn't explain itself beyond that and leaves it to the viewer to fill in the blanks.

Poorly made, terribly paced, with forgettable characters and few redeeming features this paint by numbers effort isn't terrible it's just simply not very good either.

A decent enough (Though inevitable) twist near the end saved it a point or two but even that should have been handled better.

If they make a sequel (Which is teased though I doubt it'll ever happen) I just hope everyone packs bug spray and those annoying sticky yellow tape things that catch flies! That would make the movie at least comical.

Move along, nothing to see here

RELEASED TO TV IN 2016 and written & directed by Sheldon Wilson, "The Night before Halloween" concerns a group of teens who must deal with the ramifications of a Halloween prank gone wrong. It is eventually revealed that they are under the Curse of the Carver: a curse that slays you on the night before Halloween unless you can trick someone into killing someone else.

The overall filmmaking is professional and the cast takes the material seriously and perform proficiently with Bailee Madison & Justin Kelly emerging as the main protagonists. Anthony Lemke is particularly effective as the detective. There's an almost "Wow!" moment at the halfway point where Wyatt (Alex Harrouch) reveals what was really going on during the confusing opening act and I hoped the rest of the movie would change my "Meh" feelings, but it was not to be.

The perplexing curse and the baffling non-creature it unleashes (a bunch of flies that sometimes morph into a partial monster) are too befuddling. If the viewer can hardly understand what's happening how can the teens in the story comprehend their life-or-death situation with any certainty?

Note to emerging filmmakers: Work the kinks out of your premise BEFORE making the movie. The director, Sheldon Wilson, needs to improve his scriptwriting skills because the movies he writes tend to be problematic story-wise ("The Hollow," "Neverknock" and "Stickman") whereas his movies written by others can be quite good for TV-budgeted flicks ("Mothman," "Red, Werewolf Hunter" and "Scarecrow," which is excellent).

The female cast is decent, but not stellar, rounded out by Kiana Madeira as Lindsay and Dani Kind as the secondary detective. Natalie Ganzhorn has a small role as Beth.

THE MOVIE RUNS 90 minutes and was shot in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

GRADE: C-