The Curse of Bridge Hollow – Film Review

A man and his daughter must team up to save their town after an ancient and mischievous spirit causes Halloween decorations to come to life and wreak havoc.

One of my most anticipated movies of this year was Hocus Pocus 2, having been such a humongous fan of the original. It’s kind of the perfect Halloween movie to watch with the whole family. The sequel on the other hand… let’s just say it won’t be going down as an October classic anytime soon.

I was praying that Jeff Wadlow‘s The Curse of Bridge Hollow would give me everything Hocus Pocus 2 was supposed to give me since they both had similar vibes from the trailers. I wasn’t too optimistic about this film due to Wadlow’s past directing credits (i.e. Truth or Dare), but I was still hoping for the best against all odds.

Unfortunately my gut instinct was right. The Curse of Bridge Hollow is an unbelievably boring, trope-filled, and generic family horror adventure that takes way too long for things to get moving and a predictable storyline that anybody can see coming a mile away.

I understand that not every movie needs to re-invent the wheel. That would quite literally be impossible. But at the same time, we should be getting movies that are even a little bit unique or subversive. This movie follows the exact same formula as every other family horror film out there and it gets incredibly stale just ten minutes in.

All of the characters here are also extremely annoying except for the lead girl Sydney Gordon, portrayed excellently by Priah Ferguson. All of the others seemed like they were having fun as well, such as Marlon Wayans, but everyone involved with this film got saddled with portraying annoying and trope-filled characters.

There’s always that one character that never believes that anything scary is going on until far too late, and guess what? That movie has several of those characters. Mainly, however, it’s Wayans’ character of Howard that is most like this. He sees things come to life and a bunch of other strange occurrences and yet he still thinks nothing he sees is real.

There are a couple of scenes scattered throughout this film that managed to impress me, but they were so few and far between. There’s an amazingly fun scene toward the end involving Wayans’ character using a chainsaw that was easily the best in the entire movie. It was so silly and over-the-top and the movie knew it. It worked marvellously. Unfortunately, most of the scenes in the film aren’t nearly as fun as that one chainsaw scene.

This was an incredibly disappointing movie that boasted some truly talented people such as Priah Ferguson and Marlon Wayans but, sadly, this movie did them quite dirty. Let’s just hope that we don’t get a sequel to this film anytime soon as that seems like what they were teasing at the end.

The Curse of Bridge Hollow is an unbelievably boring and generic family horror outing even if some of the performances are strong.