Children of the Night, What a Mess They Make (original) (raw)

These are the last few Halloween-related media Beth and I watched this spooky season. There are SPOILERS for all of them.

The Devil and Daniel Mouse – A weird and cheap Canadian cartoon from the seventies loosely based on the Daniel Webster story that was also the basis for the Simpsons Halloween story with Homer selling his soul for a doughnut. It’s about two hippie mice, Daniel and Jan, who are unsuccessful musicians. Jan agrees to a deal with Satan, a shapeshifting being with an enormous chin, to have a successful music career.

When the Devil demands her soul, Dan helps out by demanding a trial, which is rigged in Satan’s favor. But Dan defeats the Adversary by playing a song so good that the Devil’s hand-picked minions serving as judge and jury can’t stop dancing to it. John Sebastian provides Dan’s singing voice. I can’t say that this had all that much going on.

Dark Night of the Scarecrow – Set in a small Southern town, this is about a mentally challenged man called Bubba, similar to Lennie from Of Mice and Men, who’s friends with a child but distrusted by some of the townspeople. When the little girl is attacked by a dog and brought home by Bubba, a postal worker and gas station attendant assume he’s the one who hurt the kid, and form a posse to hunt him down where he’s hiding inside a scarecrow and kill him. Due to a lack of evidence, they’re exonerated in court, but are soon picked off one by one, always finding the scarecrow Bubba was hiding in near the scene of the crime. It’s slow but atmospheric, and the victims pretty much deserve what happens to them. Tavie mentioned that Larry Drake, who plays Bubba, later played a mentally challenged character on L.A. Law.

The Worst Witch – Beth saw this TV movie as a kid and I did not, but we have watched it together a few times as adults. I don’t think I’ve really written about it before, though. It stars Fairuza Balk, fresh off playing Dorothy in Return to Oz, as Mildred Hubble, the titular witch. She attends a school for witches, and while I don’t know that it or the books it was based on inspired Harry Potter, it has a potions teacher who bullies students and a snobby rich kid who has it in for the protagonist. Hopefully Jill Murphy wasn’t incredibly transphobic as well. Charlotte Rae, who was apparently typecast as someone involved with boarding schools, plays both the headmistress and her evil pink-haired sister who wants to take over.

She sings a song about how her students shouldn’t just be “evil, wicked and cruel,” but also filthy and smelly, and I’m not sure why poor hygiene would be a requirement for villainous witches. Maybe they’re like the Wicked Witch of the West and can’t be around water. Tim Curry shows up as the Grand Wizard, a celebrity in witch society whom many of the kids are attracted to, and who might have had a fling with the potions teacher. He sings a song in front of a blue screen about how your dog could turn into a cat on Halloween, and as in FernGully, he’s apparently unable not to sound sexual even when singing for children. (And we just rewatched Rocky Horror, too.)

There was later a TV series based on the books, but neither of us have watched it (or read the books, for that matter). I guess Mildred gets a swelled head after saving the school, which is why she’s a confident, powerful jerk in The Craft.

Dracula: Dead and Loving It – This was the last movie Mel Brooks made, and even though I liked both him and Leslie Nielsen, I hadn’t seen this before. Beth really didn’t like it, while I thought it was amusing enough but didn’t really have enough to it to work as a movie. The performances were entertainingly exaggerated, and it did look like everyone was having fun, but the jokes were mostly pretty obvious and overly repetitive. Some of the repeated gags worked because of the characters’ reactions, like Dracula’s frustration over his hypnotism going wrong and Brooks’s matter-of-fact attitude while Jonathan Harker was freaking out over being sprayed with blood; but not enough of them to make the whole thing hold together. It made some direct references to Bram’s Stoker’s Dracula, like Dracula’s shadow and his poofy hair turning out to be a wig. As is typical for Brooks’s parodies, though, it also referenced other adaptations of the story. And it got a lot of mileage over British people being uncomfortable about sex.