Baggage Bogs Down ‘Scream Team’

He sees dead people. He also vacuums them up, traps them in jars and pretty much irritates the heck out of them.

In “The Scream Team,” the Disney Channel’s silly, scary new Halloween movie (at 8 tonight), a motley bunch of ghosts meets its match in young Ian Carlyle (Mark Rendall) and his sister Claire (Kat Dennings), who attend their grandfather’s funeral in haunted Steeple Falls as the town gears up for its Zachariah Kull Halloween Festival, named for a long-dead legendary arsonist.

Meanwhile, Dad is cranky because Grandpa never showed him love and attention; Ian’s cranky because Dad thinks Grandpa’s inventions are junk; and Claire and Ian can’t work together to help Grandpa’s spirit cross over without putting each other down in mundane TV-sibling fashion.

Claire’s squeals of terror scrape nerves like nails on a chalkboard, but fear is fleeting when the teens discover the cartoony “soul removal center” in an old ruin of a house where the recently dead are ushered into the afterlife. Unfortunately, things get serious, too: Is Dad angry because he’s carrying ‘round a whole lot of hurt from childhood? Did Grandpa give Dad the cold shoulder because he didn’t love him--or because he did? Sure, Zachariah is a soul-eating ghoul now, but was he really a murderer or the victim of a 200-year-old rush to judgment?

Kathy Najimy as head usher for the dead and Eric Idle as her loony aide have a few comic moments, but the potential for fun goes mostly unrealized, diluted by an overdose of the teens’ worldly cynicism and a misguided attempt to add depth with trite armchair psychology.