tek's rating: ¾

The Curse of Bridge Hollow, on Netflix
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Caution: spoilers.

This came out in 2022, but I didn't see it until 2025. Part of the plot reminds me of the 2018 movie Goosebumps 2: Haunated Halloween, but that's probably just a coincidence. Apparently this didn't do very well with critics, but I liked it.

Marlon Wayans and Kelly Rowland play Howard and Emily Gordon, who move from Brooklyn to the town of Bridge Hollow with their 14-year-old daughter, Sydney. At first Sydney isn't happy about moving, but when they arrive in town and find that everyone there is super into Halloween, she changes her mind. Unfortunately, her father, who is a science teacher, hates Halloween, and doesn't want Sydney doing anything to celebrate the holiday. However, she meets three other kids who make up the high school's Paranormal Society, and they tell her that her new house is supposedly haunted by the ghost of Madam Hawthorne (Nia Vardalos), who died there decades ago.

Sydney tries to contact Madam Hawthorne with a ouji board app on her tablet, and that apparently causes doors to open in her house, which leads her to a storage room (or attic, I dunno). She finds a chest that contains an old turnip jack-o-lantern. (She and her father call it a pumpkin, despite it obviously being a turnip. And when they later visit Victoria, the granddaughter of Madam Hawthorne, in a nursing home, she tells them it's a turnip, but Howard still thinks it's a pumpkin. I just found this really weird. But not important.) Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. Sydney gets herself a costume for Halloween, and decorates her house, including with a fake bat. She lights the jack-o-lantern that she found, but her father gets upset and grounds her, as well as throwing the bat in the trash. He tries several times to blow out the light in the turnip, but it keeps relighting. Finally he wets his fingers to snuff the flame, and throws the turnip in the trash. But again it relights, and affects the bat decoration, bringing it to life. As it flies around, Howard tries to swat it with a broom, and ends up breaking a lot of stuff. But it eventually leaves the house, and starts bringing to life all the other Halloween decorations in Bridge Hollow.

At first, Howard doesn't believe any of this is real, but Sydney does. So they go to visit Victoria, who tells them about Stingy Jack, a local legendary figure who had been trapped in the turnip long ago by Madam Hawthorne, before he could take a soul to replace him in the afterlife or whatever. He wanted to do this to make every day Halloween. And because Sydney relit the turnip, his spirit was free to once again try to take a soul. Meanwhile, Emily (who is a lawyer) has decided to open an artisanal vegan bakery in town, for some reason. So she set up a stand at the town's Stingy Jack festival, but no one likes her baked goods. Once again I'll get ahead of myself by saying that she will eventually be the soul that Stingy Jack tries to take, so Howard and Sydney have to save her.

Sydney meets up with her new friends from the Paranormal Society, and they try to find out what had happened to Madam Hawthorne's grimoire, so they can cast a spell to trap Stingy Jack's spirit again. They find out the book had been bought by their school's principal, and find the spell. Unfortunately, his decorative skeletons come to life and attack them. Howard fights them off, but the page with the spell gets burned in the fireplace. So they must go to the crypt where Madam Hawthorne was buried, and conduct a seance to contact her spirit, which temporarily possesses Howard, and reveals the spell to them. Then they must go to the festival, where an army of decorations has assembled, and Jack possesses a decoration that was meant to represent him, as part of the annual celebration. By then, Emily had given up on her bake stand and gone home, so Howard and Sydney return there to save her from Stingy Jack.

And... I think I've revealed quite enough of the story, but it does have a happy ending. I thought the movie was pretty fun, and I liked all the music in it ("Hit the Road Jack" is a recurring theme, and rather apt). Most of the songs were pretty well-known, but there's one that played over the end credits that I also quite liked, The Tale of Stingy Jack, which I guess was original to this movie. I liked all the characters well enough. And I don't know what else to tell you, I just can't see any reason not to like the movie.


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