Hubie Halloween: Netflix’s hideously outdated Adam Sandler comedy lacks laughs

Hubie Halloween (13+, 103 minutes) Directed by Steve Brill **

goose bumps, Beetle juice, Corpse Bride, The glow, Monstrous house.

Currently, Netflix hosts many viewing options suitable for the atmosphere of October 31; this farrago is not one of them. It’s not even the best horror comic slice with the three-award-winning Golden Raspberry – that honor goes to the animated characters. Hotel transylvania.

Instead, this is a mid-level entry into the Adam Sandler Sin-e-matic Universe (ASS U), a place where alumni of the now 54-year-old comedian like Kevin James and Rob Schneider are in paid employment, the eschatological It is mixed with suffocating levels of saccharin and schmaltz and all the characters (and writers) think that we are still in the mid-1990s. Yes, 25 years after it hit theaters with Billy madison, Sandler is still peddling the same man-child buzz and mining disability, anxiety, and social awkwardness over rude and petty laughter.

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This time the setting is Salem, Massachusetts, and our “hero” is grocery store butcher and self-proclaimed Halloween monitor Hubie Dubois (Sandler). All Hallows’ Eve is the biggest night of the year for the city, with 80 percent of its annual tourists descending to the old witch trials house to party with other elaborately dressed ghouls.

As it has been for decades, Hubie, a loner who still lives at home with his mother, sees his role as making sure citizens are safe while having fun. That means monitoring any suspicious activity (such as excessive preloading of toilet paper and eggs) and ensuring the prompt removal of any spiked punch, much to the chagrin of local authorities like Steve Downey (James), who has become increasingly weary of Hubie’s excessive and obsessive reporting.

However, this year, Downey has even bigger problems. A local man locked up since the mid-1970s escaped from nearby Waterford State Mental Hospital and a pig died under suspicious circumstances. Even Hubie himself (a man who once voted most likely to marry her pillow) is a bit distracted. Suspicious noises emanate from his new neighbor Walter’s (Buscemi) house and he’s still hoping this is the year he plucks up the courage to ask out Black Cat Diner’s waitress Violet Valentine (Modern FamilyJulie Bowen), the woman he has been in love with since he was six years old.

See it’s not all bad but Hubie halloween It is not Happy gilmore, Drunk love, The wedding singer or 50 first dates. Instead, it falls somewhere around the Mr. Deeds, Little nicky Click axis of quality, premise with some pretty ideas, but with predictably childish jokes, boring “lessons” and one-dimensional female characters.

Here are some nice nods (some of them even subtle) to classic horrors like Jaws, Friday the 13th, When a stranger Calls and that movie whose name I don’t remember very well starring Michael Myers, the character, not the actor. There’s a clever conceit involving a Swiss Army thermos and a pretty brilliant vocal / visual joke involving a former NBA basketball player.

But they are the few highlights. This is a movie whose delights include a “boner joke”, a suspicious level of sweet product placement, the resurrection of the old “you’re mom so …”, insults, and offers of pratfall and vomit in the opening minute.

Sandler fans, you know what to expect, everyone else knows what to do: avoid them, or Netflix’s algorithm will haunt them with its seemingly endless supply of his handiwork until Christmas.