Watched: 10/12/2025
Format: Hallmark+
Viewing: First
Director: Maclain Nelson
Job: Copywriter/ Children's Book Author
Location of story: Evergreen Lane - which I think is in Salt Lake City
new skill: it's an old skill remembered - how to draw and write kid's books
Man: Wes Brown
Job of Man: Architect
Goes to/ Returns to: stays in same place (this is the 3rd installment)
Event: Halloween street fair
Food: Cookies
Well, Ms. Lacey Chabert has released a new movie upon the Hallmark channel, and so we're back!
This is the third installment in the Haul Out the Holly Saga, a movie series which is about people who are absolutely nuts for holidays, their HOA and rules. We've abandoned Christmas for Halloween this go-round, which - given the first movies are about going over the top with traditions - seems appropriate.
This is, I should mention, a wacky comedy series with everything about the 'burbs heightened and zany, so don't take it too seriously. It's a departure from Hallmark's usual "the characters are all smiling to let you know a joke happened" style of comedy, and, instead, works more like an 00's-era comedy - complete with joke-every-15-second pop culture referencing and a rap by Octogenarians.
 |
| These neighbors are dedicated |
In this installment, we see Emily and Jared get married after falling for each other in the first movie - in which Jared as board president used HOA rules to entrap and force Emily to spend time with him. In the second, I thought they were married, but I guess they were just @#$%ing? (Hallmark movies are infinitely better when you apply real-life to them.)
I definitely get the feeling that here in the third installment we're sort of watching the product after some pals hung out to shoot a movie, and that's actually good. They've got their characters down, it feels casual and like everyone knows each other, and I'd be curious how much was in the script and how much was improv on set.
That said, the script is running in a half-dozen directions. The usual A-B-C through-line of a Hallmark movie is completely absent as our leads are married and Hallmark does not make movies about early marriage having issues of any kind.
The movie *feels* like they took 3-4 scripts and crammed them together, uncertain what the plot of the movie was.
We're introduced to new neighbors, which I guess is a theme (we do not see the prior new neighbors from the second installment, Haul Out the Holly: Lit Up, and I'll assume after credits rolled, the psychos of this HOA murdered and buried them in shallow graves). This time it's a couple of Shakespeare professors from the university, played by the kids from the 1990's Halloweentown series. I've never seen the movies, but I guess two of the stars reconnected and got married or something. Also, they're friends with Chabert IRL, and she got them in.
But, yeah, you kind of think "oh, this movie is going to be about weirdos moving in next door and everyone thinking they're witches", but that gets dropped post haste.
There's a plot about Man's mom dating Stephen Tobolowsky's weirdo character, and that gets resolved after a misunderstanding that gets on the local news. You see, the folks of Evergreen Lane (which is a Court or Circle, but no one asked me) are putting on a Halloween carnival thing because they're so inspired by the new neighbors.
We get more cookie-eating, we get Halloween sweaters?, we get yard decorating... But the storyline seems to be that as a youth, Chabert got "Yard Yelped" by a neighbor girl, who is now a local reporter who blonde and coded as "mean". That girl's family was driven from the hood for... scaring Chabert the one time and may be ready to humiliate poor ol' psychotic Evergreen Lane.
The big challenge at the end is if the news team will show Evergreen Lane as a fraud who fails to raise the right amount of money (they say "it's more than last year!" at some point, after we spent all movie saying they haven't done Halloween on this street in two decades, so no idea what happened there). And the last fifteen minutes is a bit of a mess. But that's a product of the movie introducing something like five storylines into the film in the first hour and still needing to make time for the usual dicking around.
I don't write these things.
But the plot is really there as a thin framework for shenanigans, which is a bit odd for Hallmark, who are usually big on streamlined stories hitting a familiar set of beats. But in this case, we're just here to hang out with the folks of Evergreen Court Lane. And that's fine.
While Tobolowsky is, indeed, wacky, Melissa Peterman is kind of the secret weapon of this series, and I don't know what she writes for herself and what's script, but she's got the best weirdo dialog.
Is it stupid? I mean, the only time I kind cringed was when they went for the Frankenstein rap. I have no idea who thought that was a good idea. It's also clear no one involved knew the difference between a DJ and MC in hip-hop, which tracks. But it's definitely a comedy where they throw out a gag every few seconds and some of it lands and most do not. The best gag was absolutely the Wizard of Oz throw-away bit.
Is Chabert good? Yeah! She gets to do some funny stuff (never underestimate the value of a small human for physical comedy). But overall, she's carrying these movies well.
I just think they didn't quite know what to do with this movie, and so they took what feels like 4-5 episodes of TV and squeezed them into one 2 hour movie, and it was maybe too much.
No comments:
Post a Comment