Happy Hallowe’en from Dauntlessmedia.net!  For your reading pleasure, enjoy the following Halloween-themed reviews:

It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown

It’s a wonderfully amusing, entertaining and timeless holiday story. For all the nostalgia that It’s The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown evokes, it still remains an exceptional tale about the mystery and expectations of Halloween night – for the kid in every one of us. The fact that this brief cartoon still finds legions of new fans every year speaks to its almost universal story of bad luck, costumes, and never giving up on your dreams. Without making too much out of Linus and his quest to see The Great Pumpkin, it’s easy to recognize that his travails strike a chord in every one of us – we’ve all desperately wanted something, no matter how unrealistically everyone else though our dreams to be.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

The Nightmare Before Christmas is a wonderfully amusing film. There is a kind of magical quality to it, considering the story itself is fairly simple, straightforward and, for the most part, average. Indeed, the film’s best qualities are more in terms of its style, rather than its substance. That isn’t to say that the movie is shallow, either. Instead, The Nightmare Before Christmas manages to hypnotically weave its story through indelible imagery and musical numbers which manage to convey the spirit of the film – even if general moviegoers don’t fall in love with them.

Sleepy Hollow

Sleepy Hollow, very loosely based on the novel by Washington Irving, is an almost perfect film – from a purely visual standpoint. The settings, the characters, the lighting, the garish splashes of blood … everything is perfectly placed to create a visual style that is uniquely spooky, gothic, memorable and enjoyable. The rest of the film is a fairly standard supernatural murder-mystery plot, wherein the supernatural is being controlled by a person who wants to gain power and wealth in this world. But the film does add some interesting commentary on the ongoing tension between faith and science, and between mysticism and reason. And with a cast of fairly colorful characters, portrayed by some very talented actors, Sleepy Hollow has a lot more positives than negatives.

Van Helsing

Van Helsing is an amusing film. There is certainly enough happening for the movie to keep its audience entertained from start to finish. Its visuals are worthy of praise and the soundtrack nicely compliments the on-screen action. But the problem with this film has to do with plausibility and believability. The template for this film, by Stephen Sommers, was Sommers’ 1999 The Mummy – a film that went to great lengths to portray its events as possible, if not probable. The problem for Van Helsing, however, is that its characters – and its characterizations – are just far too cartoonish to make it a have any teeth. And a monster movie without any bite is unfortunate indeed.

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