For everyone who missed the first movie during "WWoD" reruns, some shithead in a ship captain's hat recounts the events of Mr. Boogedy to a group of kids around a campfire... oh, wait, that's the new (and clean shaven) Mr. Witherspoon. From here we get into the new stuff when Eloise's brother Elmer (and his equally obnoxious chortle) comes to visit the Davis family in their new digs. He's just in time for the annual Lucifer Falls carnival too. That's right, LuciFest, the only carnival with a super duper, supernatural :::slap sticker on your forehead::: third eye. But, can Carleton pass down Elmer's offer to become Gag City's Senior Whoopee Cushion Manager for the entire Eastern region in favor of staying in a town that makes you think of the Devil's diarrhea? Either way, Jennifer runs into a shadowy be-caped figure with a buckled hat warning her to get the fuck out of Dodge. Of course the rest of the fam figure it's just the paperboy... in a Pilgrim's hat... because, you know, it's New England and everything.

There's one guy in the town who isn't big on LuciFest going through and that's Mr. Lynch (Eugene Levy!), the owner of the property on which the carnival is held. Mr. Lynch is pissed that Carl was made this year's "honorary mayor" instead of him, so he wants to charge the town to use his land. Carl suggests using the Lucifer Falls town square for the party instead, but you know that Lynch is gonna do something to try and be all mischievous later on and ruin things for everybody. The mystery this time is the Davis's new store, formerly the site of Mr. Hamilton's House of Horrors wax museum. Who's Mr. Hamilton? That's the mystery, the guy just up and disappeared one day, leaving the museum and everything in it behind. Unfortunately, this opens a very large and menacing door that leads to numerous bad puns and the introduction of the local fortune teller, Madeleinska. Mad Maddy uses her electric crystal ball to predict that Heavy B is on his way back. I'm more concerned with Mrs. Hooter, who dresses like a witch, tends to cackle, and, of course, is named after a tit.

While the kids are checking out Mr. Boogedy/William Hanover's grave, they meet Lazarus (Vincent Schiavelli!) the local gravedigger-slash-ventriloquist, who I'm hoping has something to do with the rest of the movie, cuz I'm starting to get sick of all the cast padding going on here. Meanwhile, Lynch lives up to my prediction and, while trying to short circuit Carl's store, somehow causes an electrical feedback that travels to the graveyard and splits the Boogedy memorial statue in half and releases the ghoul from his tomb... that was in the statue all this time... somehow... what?! Never mind. Whatever the case, the Boogmeister possesses poppa, giving Carl the power to float on his back and consume large quantities of milk in record time. He also swipes Marian's old clothes from a mannequin at the Lucifer Falls Historical Society to dress up Eloise in, hence the title. So, now that Boogedy's got a vessel through which to recover his cloak from his inter-dimensional storage locker, will the phantom be able to resurrect himself into our world again? What will an ape suit have to do with Carl's exorcism? Who else will Boogedy put his glowing green hands on? How will the Davises and the people of Lucifer Falls put down the perilous Pilgrim ghoul once and for all? Or, will Big Daddy B finally get his spook on with the spectral Marian after 300 years of supernatural celibacy? I don’t know, I’m starting to nod off here and really couldn’t care less. *YAWN*

Oh man, it’s true that the magic of childhood eventually does indeed wear off, and if Bride of Boogedy is an example of this faux science, I’d say the half-life for “childhood sentimental value” is just under 20 years. Dear Isis was I bored watching this movie. Despite being disappointed in the short running time of the first Boogedy flick, I'm feeling a whole other kind of disappointment here. Disney tried so hard to over-inflate what they originally had to work with that they wound up popping the balloon and killing the party. And for having such a long, almost painful build up, the Deus ex Machina climax is so brief and unsatisfying that no level of childhood nostalgia makes it hurt any less. There are too damned many ancillary characters that just pop up for the sole purpose of standing around and doing nothing but fill screen space. At first I liked the fact that the writer was trying to flesh out the town of Lucifer Falls by introducing us to the inhabitants, but by the time Lazarus came along my ulcers started to bleed. And what the Hell was the point in bringing up the whole "Mr. Hamilton mysteriously disappeared" thing if they weren't going to do anything with it anyway?!

I miss John Astin and his inhumanly bushy mustache and eyebrows. If Leonard Frey hadn’t died of a horrible and incurable degenerative disease, I’d dig up his corpse and slap him around a while, beating him with his own detached skeletal arm and eventually leaving him in a lewd pose in the center of Times Square, straddling the dirtiest Hunt’s Point prostitute I could find. But I’m lazy and sitting through this flick had sapped me of any will I might’ve possessed beforehand, so I’m going to go grab a nap and dream about happy things, like cotton candy and suffocating Paris Hilton with a bucket of those orange Styrofoam Circus Peanuts. Happy fucking Halloween boys and girls.