Teleplay by Max Enscoe & Annie de Young and Juliet Giglio and Keith Giglio

Teenage witch Marnie Piper (Sara Paxton) heads off to—where else—Witch University in the magical otherworld of Halloweentown, where she finds new friends, old mysteries, and an ancient prophesy that seems to be about her.  This fourth installment in the Halloweentown series (which began, by odd coincidence, shortly after a series of British books about a boy wizard started getting published in the states) is everything you’d expect from a made-for-television Disney movie.  The characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is simplistic, and the story doesn’t so much move along as just get set out for the viewers to look at.  The script doesn’t even make a faint attempt to aim higher than a fourth-grade audience, and even they might find some parts a bit insulting.  A few outstanding parts crop up here and there, but they’re surrounded by so much clumsiness they’re quickly lost.  The sparse features are concerned with cast members returning to familiar roles and explanations of some of the simpler “magic” effects, while the script is never even mentioned.

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