R.L. Stine is pretty much the master of horror for kids. So it’s no surprise that one of his books would be turned into a creepy little Halloween movie!
Christopher Lloyd stars in When Good Ghouls Go Bad, which has a pretty perfect storyline. Lloyd’s grandson Danny has come to live with him in his small town. But young Danny soon learns (the scary way—with a story told in a cemetery) that an evil curse by a young goth boy in the totally awesome 1980s has prevented the town from celebrating Halloween in any way ever since!
That would so suck.
Well Danny and his grandfather plan on putting a stop to that. But a horrible accident leaves Christopher Lloyd dead…until he comes back as a zombie to help Danny resurrect Halloween. It’s like Footloose with dancing ghouls instead of dancing fools!
From the opening scene of Danny carving a pumpkin, When Good Ghouls Go Bad is a total Halloween bonanza. The lush autumnal colors absolutely saturate the screen throughout. But even better, while the film builds slowly with a lot of shenanigans between Christopher Lloyd, Danny, and the townsfolk, the movie seriously turns into a zombie film for kids!
Out of the grave come gnarly and rotten corpses rising from their eternal bed, trapping all the townsfolk in one building like a kiddie version of Night of the Living Dead.
But it’s more than just zombies. Lloyd does a stint as a creepy clown, plus one of his hands even has a mind of its own! And just wait until you see what the goth boy looks like when he comes back from the dead!
While it may not be as fast-paced as Hocus Pocus and the only famous face in the whole movie is Lloyd’s, When Good Ghouls Go Bad is a great family film to watch every year while decorating for Halloween!
