Hubie Halloween Parent Guide

Hubie Dubois (Adam Sandler) loves Halloween more than just about anybody in Salem. Unfortunately, the town doesn’t love him nearly as much: Hubie is an object of local ridicule, and a frequent target for eggs, flaming bags of poop, and rocks from the town kids. Not that any of this deters him in any way from his self-appointed duties as Volunteer Halloween Monitor. But this year, the town might actually need him: a madman has escaped from a nearby asylum, and to make matters worse there appears to be a werewolf on the loose. Armed only with his trusty Swiss-Army Thermos full of soup, can Hubie overcome the town’s loathing and his own incompetence to save Halloween?

Adam Sandler movies are broadly interchangeable: terrible jokes mixed with bad slapstick, some poor actress who gets trapped as the love interest, and a dangerous overdose of the man himself doing stupid voices. I’ve actually wondered if Sandler makes these movies as a thinly veiled excuse to make out with actresses he finds attractive. I certainly can’t think of any other reason they’d do such a thing. The only thing that really separates this from Happy Gilmore or The Waterboy is the theme – this is every other Adam Sandler movie with a coat of Halloween slapped on. The only real difference between his films is the level of child suitability.

This one falls into the more child-suitable end. There is a lot of messaging about bullying and kindness, which is all well and good, but there’s also the usual allotment of raunchy humor and random cruelty. I suppose you could show this to your kids – what I can’t think of is a good reason why you would. I expect the last thing any sane parent wants to hear from their offspring is some moronic Adam Sandler quote parroted ad nauseam for the next few months.

There are two groups of people I pity in this film. The first are the better actors who found themselves roped into this dumpster fire, namely Ray Liotta and Steve Buscemi. I can only assume that their rent just went up, and the resulting need for cash is the only reason they’re here. The second group is the audience. Two hours of this mind-numbing inanity is enough to make anyone with half a brain left in their poor abused head seriously consider flinging their TV into the nearest ravine, river, or volcanic pit. It’s only with great restraint on my part that my laptop didn’t end up shooting through our front window and into the road – and that restraint isn’t guaranteed to continue.