Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		1.5

Boo! A Madea Halloween Blu-ray Movie Review

Wake me when it's time for A Madea Purim.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman February 1, 2017

If any of you has ever had a little boy (or maybe even an adventurous little girl) to buy a Halloween costume for, you’ll know that the frequently very popular superhero outfits like Spider-Man, Superman and Batman often come replete with foam rubber inserts that build up the “musculature” of the outfits to make kids feel “bulked up”. Even that stuffing can’t come close to the padding that’s part of Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween, a paper thin entry in the ever expanding Madea filmography which finds the harridan elder teaching a teenaged relative a thing or two about being Punk'd, or something like that. Like most Madea outings, there are fitful laughs to be had, but Perry is so content to merely trot out his universe of characters and to let them riff on various supposedly comedic nuggets that he never tries to do anything other than line up a series of vignettes in order facilitate this approach. Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween might have been a fun humorous ghost story a la the great old Abbott and Costello classic The Time of Their Lives, but instead it’s another tired entry in a series that really needs to do something different to scare up some kind of audience response.

Kind of interestingly, Tyler Perry’s Boo! A Madea Halloween opens in a largely white frat house, where frat president Jonathan (Yousef Erakat) is urging his buddies to make the upcoming Halloween party the best ever in the fraternity’s evidently legendary history of Animal House level shenanigans. When Jonathan and the other guys notice a bunch of pretty girls walking by outside, they run out to invite them to the party, which is when Madea’s grandniece Tiffany (Diamond White) gets involved in the story. Unfortunately for Tiffany, her uptight father Brian (Tyler Perry) drives by at that very moment, losing it with a daughter he’s trying to raise himself and whom he wants to stay far, far away from what he sees as the dangerous environment of the frat house.

In a none too surprising turn of events, Brian, at the end of his tether vis a vis dealing with Tiffany, invites Madea over to take charge. There’s a silly and completely needless sidebar involving Madea sitting outside with Aunt Bam (Cassi Davis) as various trick or treaters drift by (getting ripped off by Aunt Bam, supposedly a hilarious plot point), and a similarly ridiculous if at least marginally more funny introduction of Joe (Tyler Perry) and Hattie (Patrice Lovely). Also unsurprisingly, all of these characters end up hightailing it over to Brian’s house getting most of the main characters together on one set for quite a bit of the film.

Tiffany of course sneaks out of her Dad’s house to go to the party, but also of course Madea is on to her, and ends up at the frat house herself, where there’s a truly bizarre interchange that is one of the most squirm inducing in the entire Madea franchise, where the frat boys think Madea is a dude dressed up as a lady (yeah, irony, right?) and demand to see her breasts, something she gladly obliges them with a view of. When things start going south, party wise, hurt feelings and urges to prank Madea and her brood start playing into the second half of the film, with a number of supposedly spooky happenings playing out which have already been identified as jokes.

Perry just seems to be filling time with this entry (and isn’t it a little odd that the Blu-ray is appearing in the early months of the year rather than around the holiday it celebrates?). His writing is frequently a little lax, preferring tropes and familiar relationships to dominate rather than really seeking to delve deeply into characters, though admittedly any given Madea enterprise is not exactly the right vehicle for screenwriting navel gazing. But this is certainly one of the lazier feeling efforts from Perry, one which just kind of ambles along, delivering a titter here or there but resolutely failing to provide guffaws or even any of the patented Perry schmaltz.

Boo! A Madea Halloween Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Tyler Perry's Boo! A Madea Halloween is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Lionsgate Films with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. Technical data on the film is a bit sparse, but this looks like a typically sharp and sleek digitally shot feature, though detail levels are occasionally hampered by the fact that so much of the film takes place at night or in other dimly lit environments. Perry frames several establishing shots of the main home featured in the film with a kind of hazy purple overlay supposedly meant to evoke spectral spirits or an otherwise spooky ambience, something that definitely detracts from detail levels. Ghoulish lighting is also used in other selected scenes, though detail levels remain at least relatively high in these moments. In decent lighting, the palette looks natural and fine detail is quite good, with cool textures in some of the Halloween costumes being worn offered with precision.

Boo! A Madea Halloween Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

There's some fun music in Tyler Perry's Boo! A Madea Halloween, something that gives quite a bit of energy to the lower end of the film's DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. More traditional horror effects like startle LFE bombasts also provide some floorboard rumbling moments. Otherwise, though, surround activity here is limited to things like the crowd noises in the frat house or even some of the ambient environmental effects in the early trick or treating sequence with Madea and Aunt Bam outside on a bench. Fidelity is fine and there are no problems to report on this generally very enjoyable track.

Boo! A Madea Halloween Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Why We Love Madea (1080p; 9:53) contains some of the character's "greatest hits" along with talking head segments. I wasn't convinced.


• Boo! From the Crew (1080p; 2:26) is a pretty useless collection of people saying boo, and, no, I'm not kidding.

Boo! A Madea Halloween Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Even by the increasingly low standards of these interminable Madea movies, Tyler Perry's Boo! A Madea Halloween is a pretty tired enterprise. Are there laughs? Sure, a few, but when the most dependable source of humor is Madea punching a clown, there's obviously not any reliance on smart comedic writing. Technical merits are generally strong for those considering a purchase.