The Night Before Halloween (2016)

Best movie ever!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

It's the night before Halloween. Lindsay (Kiana Madeira) invites her friends over. Their other friends Kyle (Jahmil French) and Adam (Justin Kelly) are not there. Wyatt (Alex Harrouch) is killed. It's actually a prank. Megan (Bailee Madison) is scared but Beth (Natalie Ganzhorn) is unconscious after hitting her head. Megan wants to call an ambulance but the others refuse. Kyle goes crazy secretly under The Curse of the Carver. They abandon Beth in the streets to be picked up by the ambulance. Kyle leaves a message explaining the curse and is later killed at midnight. Detective Burke (Anthony Lemke) investigates. One year later, Megan receives a call from Beth despite her being in a coma. The others return to town after similar calls.It's a convoluted curse and I'm not sure about the fine print. Abandoning Beth in the streets doesn't make sense for most of the characters. It's a lot of teenage stupidity to swallow. The plot is so swiss cheese that I'm not sure which is an actual plot hole. There are lots of conveniences and bad turns. This could have worked as a prank gone wrong or these teens getting cursed. The ongoing curse idea is tiresome which is worst than simply tired. Jumping a year ahead necessitates a lot of questionable plot. The fly monster is intriguing but also presents plenty of questionable logic. This is generally bad.

Some kids play a prank on a friend who ends up electrocuted in the process. So they do the logical thing--drop her off in front of the hospital and escape. Back at home they come up with a story. One of them borrows another's car and tries to escape from something chasing him. He crashes but manages to make a video before he dies.A year later all the kids start getting texts from the injured girl who is actually in a coma. They go the hospital. There we learn of a stain on the ceiling and flies. One of the kids who's gone missing reappears and shows them the video of the dead guy where things are explained. So it turns out that guy was cursed and the only way to pass on the curse is buy getting someone else killed. Because they were all part of the prank now they are cursed and have this night, the night before Halloween to make someone else die or they will die.The police are sort of after them and so is the curse--a bunch of flies that can take on the shape of a creature or of weapons. Of course the kids will have different ways of dealing with this, some will be fine with trying to get someone else killed others reject the idea and will try to figure out some other way out.The Night Before Halloween is a surprisingly good production for a Syfy movie. Unfortunately only the production is good. Everything else isn't. In particular the story, which would be more suited for a short. The problem is that all we focus on is these unremarkable kids we can't even care about. It's actually a relief to see some adults, in the form of the cops. It's also Anthony Lemke who in the role of the main detective gives the most convincing performance. Surprisingly, this movie is all business. There's not much of an attempt at romance, or comedy or anything else for that matter. The problem is that the business of this movie just doesn't convince. It would have helped if the curse didn't come in the utterly unscary form of flies. The idea itself of a curse that has to be resolved in 24 hours isn't a bad idea nor is it new. More should have been done with the idea if an additional writer would have been hired. Granted, this is a pretty bland movie for teens and about teens, I'm not sure though even teens would enjoy this.

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.

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.