tek's rating: ½

The Scream Team, on Disney Channel
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This first aired in 2002, but I'm pretty sure I never saw it until I watched it on Disney+ in 2022. (Wow, it's kinda hard to believe I'm twenty years late on this. Actually, it's hard to believe it's been the 21st century for over two decades now. But that's neither here nor there.) There's plenty about this movie that is kind of ridiculous, but I enjoyed it anyway, in large part because I'm a fan of Kat Dennings. Also because there are a couple of decent plot twists.

So, there are these two kids, Claire (Dennings) and her younger brother, Ian, who go with their father, Richard, to visit his hometown of Steeple Falls after their grandfather, Frank, dies. Claire and Ian end up meeting a couple of ghosts, Ed (Eric Idle) and Jumper, who were supposed to guide Frank's soul to the waystation run by another ghost, Mariah (Kathy Najimy), to go through a portal to... whatever. But Frank isn't ready to cross over, just yet. Meanwhile, there's a guy named Warner (Nigel Bennett), who is organizing the town's tenth annual Halloween festival, which centers around the local legend of an inventor named Zachariah Kull, who was executed about 200 years ago after he had supposedly killed his wife, Rebecca. Zachariah was also considered a pyromaniac, who now supposedly seeks revenge on the town as a ghost who sets fires, I guess. Anyway, Zachariah steals Frank's soul, as he has done with countless other souls over the centuries, and Frank's grandkids want to stop Zachariah and free all the souls.

Incidentally, I want to mention that the phrase "scream team" doesn't appear in this movie at all. Instead, Jumper calls Ed and himself the "soul patrol". So the title is kind of weird. And I don't really know what else to say. It's basically just a silly movie, but it can be kind of fun, if you watch it in the right frame of mind.


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