The Curse of Bridge Hollow

Sydney Gordon is a brave, adventurous girl who believes in ghosts and has a strained relationship with her science-obsessed father, Howard. When the Gordon family moves from Brooklyn to a small town called Bridge Hollow (a thinly veiled real-life Sleepy Hollow), Syd is intrigued— and Howard uneasy —about the town’s obsession with Halloween. Syd meets her new school’s Paranormal Society: nerdy Mario, quiet Jamie, and the Society’s goth girl leader, Ramona; the Society inform Syd that she now lives in a house generally perceived to be haunted. When Syd attempts to contact the ghost who supposedly lives in the house, she finds a strange, shriveled Jack-o-Lantern in a treasure chest in the storage room.

Despite Howard’s clear contempt for Halloween, his wife and Syd’s mother Emily interests herself in making vegan snacks for the local Stingy Jack festival, and Syd rebels against her father by putting up Halloween decorations, lighting the lantern she found, and dressing up like a witch. However, when Howard attempts to put out the lantern, red light spreads from the lantern and turns a bat prop in the trash into a real bat with glowing red eyes that taunts Howard and Syd before flying away and spreading its curse to witch decorations, which come to life and fly into the sky. Syd witnesses this, and tries to tell Howard, but Howard insists there must be a logical explanation, even when he witnesses Syd and their neighbor, Sully, fighting off a group of prop zombies that have also come to life. Syd learns from Sully that the descendant of the woman who died in the house is still alive and elderly in a nursing home, and she takes Howard to discuss the lantern with the woman, who tells them that when lit, the lantern unleashed the curse of Stingy Jack, who will then take a soul at midnight to take his place so he can “make every day Halloween”.

After fighting off spider dummies that have came to life as the curse spreads, Howard confides in Syd that he hates Halloween because when he was a young boy, his friends dared him to explore a creepy abandoned house, where he fell down into the floorboards and hallucinated a bunch of living skeletons closing in on them. Syd meets up with the Paranormal Society at her school and explains what happened; while there, the group find out that a resident of their town has a page torn from a spell book that could help them re-trap Jack inside of the lantern. They go to the address of the person who has the page only to find it is their school principal, who owns a lot of Satanic propaganda and gives them floss as candy. The group manage to find the page, but before they can memorize the incantation, the curse spreads to a group of skeleton football players used as props in the principal’s yard. The group are unable to beat back the skeletons due to the helmets they wear and Howard’s fear of skeletons keeping him from joining in. When the page is thrown into the burning fireplace and the group are cornered in the principal’s basement, Syd gives Howard a pep talk which helps him resolve his fear of skeletons, and he fights back them all with a chainsaw and Bruce Lee-inspired combat moves. As the rest of the Halloween decorations go to congregate as an army at the Stingy Jack festival, the group goes to a crypt so they can find out the incantation for the spell from the original owner of the spellbook, the ghost who supposedly haunts Syd’s new house.

While the Paranormal Society and the principal go to the town square to stop the Halloween decorations from attacking the town, Syd and Howard realize that Emily has left the festival and is at home with the lantern, and go back to their house to return Stingy Jack to his lantern— a statue of Stingy Jack used for the festival is possessed by Stingy Jack and threatens Emily, mistaking her for the one who found his lantern and the one whose soul should take his place. Howard attempts the incantation to bind Jack several times as he tries to take Emily away, but Syd reminds him he has to believe in it for it to work, and after Howard says the incantation while believing, Jack is successfully banished again, and all the other Halloween decorations, who are mid-showdown with the rest of the town, fall down, inanimate again.

After what they’ve gone through, Howard becomes more accepting of Halloween, Syd joins the Paranormal Society, and Emily begins to bake treats that aren’t vegan, claiming “you only live once”. Syd and Howard go to the storage room to reflect on what happened to them, and find more treasure chests hidden away. Reminded of Jack’s curse, they both reply “Oh hell no!”

• Marlon Wayans as Howard Gordon
• Priah Ferguson as Sydney Gordon
• Kelly Rowland as Emily Gordon
• John Michael Higgins as Principal Floyd
• Lauren Lapkus as Mayor Tammy Rice
• Rob Riggle as Sully
• Nia Vardalos as Madam Hawthorne
• Abi Monterey as Ramona
• Holly J. Barrett as Jamie
• Myles Vincent Perez as Mario
• Helen Slayton-Hughes as Victoria

On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an approval rating of 46% based on 26 reviews, with an average rating of 5/10.[8] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 38 out of 100 based on 10 critics, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews".[9]

• The Curse of Bridge Hollow on Netflix
• The Curse of Bridge Hollow at IMDb