R. L. Stine's The Haunting Hour: Don't Think About It (2006) review

(5/10)

This pretty much goes through like an episode of Goosebumps, minus the nostalgia and better performances. It still had a decent entertainment factor, but it was still so much better the first couple times I saw it.

PLOT:Cassie (Emily Osment) has just moved to a new school with her parents and annoying little brother named Max (Alex Winzenread) who's scared of anything that moves. She has just moved to this school around Halloweentime and is a very different person from everyone else. On her first day, she meets a popular guy named Sean (Cody Linley), and a mean-spirited, popular girl named Priscilla (Brittany Elizabeth Curran), who is this year's Pumpkin Queen. So far, things aren't looking good for Cassie, but all changes when she discovers a Halloween store between an alley. She enters and discovers all of these cool things, but the shopkeeper (Tobin Bell) points out a certian book entitled "The Evil Thing" to her. She buys it and notices that it says "Do Not Read Aloud" on the first page. Later on, her brother angers her, so she reads it aloud it him in bed. What she doesn't know, however, is that the evil thing is real, and it's now out to get her and all those around her on this Halloween night. It's a decent plot executed almost well.



ACTING:The performances in this movie are anything but good, really bad actually. Emily Osment hardly had enough props to play the lead of gothic Cassie; I knew about a dozen others who could have played the character better. She did have her moments, but she wasn't really good. This movie is so badly acted, however, that it gets her in the spot of the shiners for this movie. The other shiners would be Tobin Bell as the stranger, Cody Linley as Sean, and Cassie's parents played by John Hawkinson and Michelle Duffy. Tobin Bell could've been the saving grace of this movie if they would have used him for more than just a cameo with a cheesy script. Two performances that really got on my nerves, though, were Brittany Elizabeth Curran as Priscilla and Alex Winzenread as Max. Everytime they were on-screen, I found the acting to be unconvincing and dreadful.

SCORE:The score was actually pretty good. It set the creepy atmosphere rather well. The soundtrack wasn't too bad either; most of them were all fitting songs recorded by independent artists, except for the now-annoying title song by Emily Osment.

EFFECTS:The effects were scattered in their quality. Some were good and some were bad. For example, I thought the effects for the slime and the monster was pretty good. Convincing to an extent, it was. However, the effects for the baby monsters were pretty lame and cheesy.



OTHER CONTENT:This movie pretty much ran like a feature length "Goosebumps" episode; it had the vision of R. L. Stine, except downgraded. The script and plot were all just as low quality as expected, and the performance were horrible. Then again, this movie did capture a good bit of creepy aspects and Halloween glory. I'm a sucker for Halloween spirit, and this did have it. I'll give it credit for putting the Halloween spirit in there along with a good, spooky ending, but this movie has some major flaws.

OVERALL,a mediocre Halloween movie with an almost decent plot, bad acting, creepy score and mainly good soundtrack, scattered effects, and a cheesy script, but it did have a good bit of Halloween spirit put into it along with a creepy ending.