On The Howard Stern Show last year, Adam Sandler issued a dire threat. If he failed to win the Best Actor Oscar for Uncut Gems, he announced, “I’m going to fucking come back and do one again that is so bad on purpose just to make you all pay.” Well, guess what? Joaquin Phoenix has a lot to answer for.
In fact, Hubie Halloween isn’t the worst film to emerge from Sandler's ten-picture Netflix deal (that honour, so far anyway, goes to atrocious 2015 spoof Western The Ridiculous 6). But it's also an undeniable disappointment, after the fine-tuned freneticism of Uncut Gems, to witness Sandler back in sloppy comedy mode, with a hectic but virtually laugh-free horror-themed caper, which really should have been called ‘The Ridiculous 666’.
Universal's aborted attempt at a Dark Universe was to bring together Tom Cruise, Russell Crowe and Johnny Depp. Sandler's Dark Universe doesn't aim quite so high, summoning Rob Schneider, Kevin James and Shaquille O'Neal to play key roles in its spooky shenanigans. On the plus side, you also get Steve Buscemi (with furry werewolf arms), some brief bouts of Ray Liotta rage, and about ten seconds of Ben Stiller, sporting an oversized moustache that's one of the film's funnier elements.
As for Sandler himself, well, you've seen Hubie before, though not with that name. The shorts-wearing, Thermos-obsessed man-child, who cycles around Salem, Massachusetts, getting bullied by children and over-enthusiastically talking up the merits of pumpkins, is straight from the Sandler playbook, complete with that voice and a high-pitched scream whenever anything surprises him. Which is, by rough estimate, every 15 seconds. It quickly becomes a mild ordeal just to track the plot, not least because the feeble stabs at humour (fart jokes, fart-joke T-shirts, the pun "Hallo-weiner") don't offer much in the way of distraction.
There is some entertainment to be had in watching an Adam Sandler comedy that cribs from John Carpenter films (one of the better gags involves Hubie meeting the host of a local radio broadcast, à la The Fog, and finding that not all is as it seems), and it feels amiably half-baked rather than a total catastrophe. Still, that's slim praise. Clocking in at 102 uneventful minutes, two things are for sure: it’s no gem, and plenty should have been cut.
