HUBIE HALLOWEEN (2020)

HUBIE HALLOWEEN (2020)

Tagline: Fear Less.

(Comedy, Mystery, Family Halloween Night) [PG-13]

Happy Halloween to all. And to all a good fright.

At some point, I want to get to reviewing all the great Adam Sandler movies. I don’t have the same hang-ups about him as a lot of people and I also have a hard time not supporting someone who has quite literally rescued a few careers and kept others afloat. Sandler also has a personal reputation for being very kind, so what is there not to like about at least him personally? So how is this movie you ask? Well, you came to the right place.

In this one, Hubie Dubois is a resident of the town of Salem, Massachusetts and he really loves Halloween. He has a lot of devotion to the town, but they don’t all return his affection for all things Halloween. This Halloween, this mocked man, is going to have to be the one to save the town from the things that go bump in the night. 

First off if fans of Sandlers were turned off by this movie it may be because instead of being a character more like HAPPY GILMORE or MR DEEDS, we end up getting THE WATERBOY again. Now as a movie I thought THE WATERBOY was epic, but as a character, it was far from Sandler at his best. The voice is just startlingly annoying and the character is hard to embrace if you add a bit of authoritarian rudeness into the mix. Unfortunately, that is what we get with Hubie. Sadly the character I hoped to like the most, I am not that crazy about at all. 

This movie is loaded with the usual HAPPY MADISON cast but not all of them. With Kevin James as Sgt. Steve Downey is the town's best or second-best cop. Steve Buscemi is awesome in this as Walter Lambert and serves as one of the catalysts to the main mystery in the film. Add Rob Schneider and Ben Stiller and we’ve still got a pretty good chunk of humor here. We also get the return of Julie Bowen who played Sandler’s girlfriend in HAPPY GILMORE. Needless to say, the acting is all pretty great and we even get some cool performances out of STRANGER THINGS actor Noah Schnapp, and Paris Berelc best known as Skylar Storm from the TV show LAB RATS: ELITE FORCE. The movie also has Adam Sandler's real-life wife and daughter in it. Oddly Alaina Pinto was fired from her normal job after appearing in this movie because it violated her contract at WHDH in Boston. Bloody hell. 

This movie has a decent plot as the townspeople start disappearing one by one on Halloween night and Hubie is left to try and figure out what is going on with very little help. He is equipped with a thermos this is basically everything anyone would need all at once so that’s kind of cool. We do get a slight bit of a scare factor in this movie, but it's kept somewhat light. The ending is actually a nod to the original FRIDAY THE 13TH movie, and there are some other nods to films like JAWS and CHRISTINE. It also utilizes several character nods to other HAPPY MADISON films. 

Overall this is a bit of a fun and sometimes frightful but not gory romp if you can handle basically watching THE WATERBOY in a completely different setting because Hubie is basically Bobby Boucher in this movie. As such this flick is considered more of a comedy for Halloween than horror. 

For me, this is a 4 out of 7. I had a hard time not enjoying it, I would just have rather seen Adam playing the role of Hubie in a more straight-up fashion as I mentioned earlier. Outside of that, this is the kind of humor envelope you would hope for in a HAPPY MADISON movie.

GRAPHICS ARE THE PROPERTY OF HAPPY MADISON PRODUCTIONS AND ARE USED FOR REVIEW PURPOSES ONLY. 

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