Girl vs. Monster

Skylar Lewis (Olivia Holt) comes from a family of monster hunters and she doesn't know it. Her parents keeps her home for Halloween but she decides to cut the power to the home alarm. The problem is that power is also cut from the containment vessel and various monsters are released. Family friend Cobb reveals the family secret. With her scared friends Henry and Sadie, she must recapture Deimata who intends to possess her.

This Disney movie is a showcase for some of its young stars and is aimed for their young fans. It's inferior in many ways. The writing, the adult actors, the special effects, and the plotting are all second rate in one way or another. Mostly, this relies on the movie's young stars. Olivia Holt is definitely a beauty although she may be better off playing the mean girl. Kerris Dorsey plays the best friend and she may have better dorky innocence to accentuate the leading role. Why not have the mean girl and the sweet girl team up to defeat the monsters? The plot doesn't really make any sense. I don't know why she would go to the party except that it needs to manufacture the situation. It does have the central premise about fear which is very appealing. One must grade on a curve for these kinds of movies.

Monsters are gaining strength and power as they feed on the increased fear of humans on Halloween. Meanwhile, a teen girl who simply wants to enjoy her normal life, discovers she belongs to a family of monster hunters

There is definitely an audience for this movie. Just not a very big one. The problem with movies like this is that they don't age well. The music and the story are geared toward a very specific audience and time period. There's a line in one of the songs that says, "You don't have to try that hard." That feels like the motto for this movie. From an adults viewpoint, it's poorly written and poorly executed to the point that it's hard to overlook and enjoy what's presented here. It feels long and gets repetitious. The acting and dialogue is cringey at times. I've never seen ghostbusters, but from what I know about it, this movie feels like a preteen version of that movie.

The Magic Kingdom came up short with this made for TV movie designed to showcase the talents of Olivia Holt and Luke Benward. Girl vs. Monster if you're over the age of 12 will have you laughing in all the wrong places.

Not that Benward and Holt are bad, in fact they make this somewhat tolerable. Their best moments are in the musical interludes. There should have been more of them.

Young Olivia typical teen with strict parents wants to go to a Halloween Party real bad, but she's got a curfew. The parents have reason to worry about her though. Unbeknownst to their daughter, they're professional monster hunters with equipment that the Ghostbusters got rid of of in a garage sale. When some monsters get loose on Halloween that's when Olivia discovers her roots.

Now maybe if the folks who made Ghostbusters did this one it might have been a whole lot better. Girl vs. Monster is not the best product out of the Magic Kingdom.

The kindest thing you could say about this mess is that the budget was too low so they had to take shortcuts.

Unfortunately if you read the credits you will see that this is a 100% Disney Channel product, so you had one of the greatest and most powerful corporations on the planet behind this film, so you can't merely blame the budget.

You can however blame some overpaid Disney exec blueskying with his team, saying something like "Halloween is upcoming and everyone knows we OWN that franchise but ever since High School Musical, we also have a musical franchise, so let's kill two birds with one stone and do both at the same time. Now, where do we go for lunch today?" This kind of thinking led to the creation of the SPORK.

Nothing is right here -- the writing, the acting, the special effects, the excessive use of colored smoke, easily one of the worst Disney productions of all time.

This came out when I was 10 and I loved it so much, I am going to go re-watch it asap just for some memories of childhood. I would recommend this title to anyone who had children that are into defeating monsters or who are excited by futuristic devices, as this will fulfill their imagination as it definitely did to me. I loved this movie!