Nice low budget thriller that delivers spooky elements such as voodoo dolls, ESP, witchcraft, broken romances, spy cameras, illness curses and Commissioner Gordon (Neil Hamilton) as the bad guy. It's all in good Drive-In programmer fun.
This film is it belongs in the rare "Alternate Reality" genre, the concept being these characters live on a "different Earth" than you or I know. That's always neat. But it's clear this screenplay was green-lit more on Gervais' reputation as a TV star than for its quality. Many sequences are only mildly amusing, the plot meanders quite a bit and many loose ends are left hanging. Some egos need to learn their is no shame in getting your script tuned-up before bringing it to the set. Wait for this one to show up on free-TV.
I probably haven't seen this movie since the 70's, and for some reason I categorized this as one of the "lesser" Peanuts movies. Nice to discover tonight that this is not such a bad little movie after all. It moves along quickly, has a couple of great gags and is backed by a decent theme song. It's quite decent after all.
Charles Schulz gets sole writing credit, and I have to wonder how free he allowed himself to stray from the core Peanuts universe of the strip. One peculiar gag has Snoopy taking his chopper on the open road with Charlie Brown and Woodstock, a la "Easy Rider." And of course you don't want to think too hard about a group of elementary school kids left to fend for themselves in the snow-covered wild for days. I'm not sure that would have been accepted in the daily comic strip.
What's really strange is this movie obviously inspired the college comedy "Up the Creek" seven years later, which has the same plot and very similar perils.
I understand the Peanuts movies got heavy airplay on 80's HBO, so future film writers were evidently watching.
