I had nearly forgotten about this, a half-hour TV special from '91, one of Hanna-Barbera's few live-action productions. The story involves a brother and sister pair of trick r' treaters, a candy factory closing and putting everyone in town out of the job, visiting aliens looking for fuel, and an old woman studying bugs in order to become immortal.
That's a lot of ground to cover in twenty-some minutes and some of those plot lines don't get much development. The old woman, played by Rhea Perlman in a fright wig, is mostly a plot device to endanger our protagonists. She hangs out in a creepy Victorian mansion on a hill, has a laboratory full of bubbling chemicals, and a bumbling, monosyllabic henchman. (Who somehow isn't a hunchback.) These are all nice horror-lite elements, even if they don't add much.
The main attraction is the aliens. Considering this is a television production from a faltering studio in 1991, the special effects are extremely good. The Martians are brought to life with CGI and, while it's primitive, it's impressive for the time. The fact that the aliens are blatantly cartoons helps a lot. There's not much to them and they're even color-coded. The blue one is the captain, the red one is the science experts, there's the gold, hopping, child-like one that contributes nothing to the team, and finally a rainbow colored Mogwai looking guy (voiced by Paul Williams, who I guess didn't have anything better to do that day) spends most of the movie digging the spaceship out of the ground. With the help of a dog who is conveniently named Digger, for those not paying attention.
The fuel the aliens are looking for turns out to be, ah, candy. So brother and sister take them trick r' treating. This leads to the scene you're probably expecting, of the aliens hiding in plain sight, pretending to be kids in costumes. The really arbitrary plot detail about the mean old woman needing special bugs leads to the two plot threads awkwardly fusing together. That plot line is resolved very quickly. I'm not sure if it was needed at all.
There's some sap. The kids have a dead mom and discussions about that take up too much time. There's a literal magical conclusion. Luckily, there's almost no lame kid-friendly humor or no bad slapstick. "The Last Halloween" is super obscure. I only remember it airing once when it was new. It was heavily advertised at the time, including a promotional comic in Disney Adventure Magazine. I only vaguely remembered something about CGI aliens sucking up candy, and then something about a guy in a barn with a vat of green liquid? It was nice to finally find this and confirm I'm not crazy. It's not half bad, as far as these things go.
That's a lot of ground to cover in twenty-some minutes and some of those plot lines don't get much development. The old woman, played by Rhea Perlman in a fright wig, is mostly a plot device to endanger our protagonists. She hangs out in a creepy Victorian mansion on a hill, has a laboratory full of bubbling chemicals, and a bumbling, monosyllabic henchman. (Who somehow isn't a hunchback.) These are all nice horror-lite elements, even if they don't add much.
The main attraction is the aliens. Considering this is a television production from a faltering studio in 1991, the special effects are extremely good. The Martians are brought to life with CGI and, while it's primitive, it's impressive for the time. The fact that the aliens are blatantly cartoons helps a lot. There's not much to them and they're even color-coded. The blue one is the captain, the red one is the science experts, there's the gold, hopping, child-like one that contributes nothing to the team, and finally a rainbow colored Mogwai looking guy (voiced by Paul Williams, who I guess didn't have anything better to do that day) spends most of the movie digging the spaceship out of the ground. With the help of a dog who is conveniently named Digger, for those not paying attention.
The fuel the aliens are looking for turns out to be, ah, candy. So brother and sister take them trick r' treating. This leads to the scene you're probably expecting, of the aliens hiding in plain sight, pretending to be kids in costumes. The really arbitrary plot detail about the mean old woman needing special bugs leads to the two plot threads awkwardly fusing together. That plot line is resolved very quickly. I'm not sure if it was needed at all.
There's some sap. The kids have a dead mom and discussions about that take up too much time. There's a literal magical conclusion. Luckily, there's almost no lame kid-friendly humor or no bad slapstick. "The Last Halloween" is super obscure. I only remember it airing once when it was new. It was heavily advertised at the time, including a promotional comic in Disney Adventure Magazine. I only vaguely remembered something about CGI aliens sucking up candy, and then something about a guy in a barn with a vat of green liquid? It was nice to finally find this and confirm I'm not crazy. It's not half bad, as far as these things go.
