BEFORE: Octavia Spencer carries over one more time from "Ma", and now you can sort of tell how behind I'm running, this film came out in time for Halloween 2020, and it made a big splash on HBO Max, but now here we are, two years later, and I finally found a way to link to it. One big problem, though, it's not on HBO Max any more, which is weird because it was pitched as a "Max Original", and I know Netflix keeps their original movies on their service long past the typical two-year window, I finally watched "Mudbound" on Netflix after three or four years of trying to link to it. So why did this disappear from HBO Max so quickly? That suggests to me that the film is terrible, and/or nobody was watching it. But if it's a horror movie, or even a horror-ish movie (it's for kids, umm, I think) you might expect that people would want to watch it during October, and then maybe sort of forget about it during the other eleven months. It's not the movie's fault...or is it?
THE PLOT: A young boy and his grandmother have a run-in with a coven of witches and their leader.
AFTER: Yeah, this one's pretty hard to get a read on - I know it's based on a children's story written by Roald Dahl, but he was an odd bird, right? Like "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" is really about a reclusive, madman chocolate maker who employs slave labor Oompa-Loompas from some fictional African country, and for fun he allows children to compete amongst themselves for tickets to enter his chocolate factory, where most of them get tortured or injured in the name of teaching them life lessons on how to be better people. And yet somehow that's one of the most beloved stories for kids? What's wrong with THAT picture? Don't even get me started on "James and the Giant Peach", we all know what THAT's a metaphor for...
Now they're making a new version of "Matilda", and that one's all about bullying a girl with telekinetic powers, but rumor has it that the new version's very problematic because they're really dyking up Miss Trunchbull. But there was already a film version of "Matilda", and many people like it, so why do we need another one? Similarly, this 2020 HBO film is the second version of "The Witches", there was one released in 1990 with Anjelica Huston as the lead witch, here in the 2020 version it seems they changed the lead boy character and his grandmother into African-American characters, and I suppose that's fine, they're the heroic characters and the lead witch is still white. Though, to be fair, they added some Black witch characters here, too.
Really, none of this should matter, but of course it does, on some level.
I do want to watch the earlier film version of "The Witches", but there was no way to link to it from here, or to make it part of my October chain this year. Of course, the version I don't need to see right now is still available on HBO Max, but the one I can link to is gone - sure, it's on iTunes for a $3.99 rental, but I found a weird foreign version of YouTube that had it available for FREE. (Shhh...don't tell anyone...). This week's loose theme is sort of about families, from weird ones ("The Addams Family 2") to surrogate ones ("Ma") to even psychotic and demon-possessed ones ("The Amityville Horror") and tonight's film is about a young boy who loses his parents in a car accident, and goes to live with his grandmother, who tries her best to help him learn to enjoy life again.
Part of that involves telling him stories about witches and how they navigate the world - Grandma is some kind of faith healer or herbalist or something, and when she was very young she watched as another girl, Alice, fell under the spell of a witch and got turned into a chicken. The girl's family didn't believe that their daughter had become a chicken, or perhaps they knew and didn't care, because they needed the eggs. (Sorry, old joke.). Back in the present, Grandma runs afoul of another witch who curses her with a recurring cough, or perhaps a more serious disease, and the coughing is just a symptom. But the movie sort of glosses over all of that, because our young Hero Boy encounters a witch himself in the grocery store, and she offers him candy. Our parents always warned us about strangers with candy, but yet somehow they still sent us out on Halloween to get exactly that.
PROGRAMMING NOTE: Halloween is just a little over two weeks away, and let me remind all parents out there that if you take your kids to the drugstore and give them $10 each to spend on candy, they can buy EXACTLY what they want, which is much better than them getting all the random candy that they DON'T want from strangers. Then you won't have to worry about them eating tainted candy, or candy with drugs in it, or apples with razor blades in them. AND you'll save money because then they won't need a costume, so this plan is cheaper and safer - and any kid of mine would take this offer, if I'd trained them right. I know I'm a total buzzkill, but also, hey, you're welcome. Think about it for a bit and you may realize the benefits of my plan.
SO, once Grandma realizes that there's a witch cursing her and trying to tempt her grandson with candy, she packs their bags and they head off to stay in a hotel on the Gulf of Mexico. But damn, wouldn't you know it, this fantastic hotel is also scheduled to play host to the witches coven, like they're having a convention or their annual meeting there. The coven is pretending to be an organization established to prevent cruelty to children, but really they're gathering together to discuss their plan to use a potion to turn all children into mice. As Grandma pointed out, witches in this story can't stand the smell of children, but this kind of goes against what we were told in "Hansel & Gretel", also "Tales from the Darkside", where witches are shown EATING children. Well, which is it? If they can't stand the way children smell, then they probably wouldn't want to eat them, right? A big part of the taste of your food comes to you through smell.
We also learn that all witches are bald, they have claws for hands and clubbed feet, and they wear special shoes and long gloves to blend in. Umm, OK, sure, but aren't they usuall depicted in drawings with long hair? Next you'll tell me they don't ride flying brooms or wear pointy hats...
Anyway, they're going to spread their mission around the world, tempting kiddies with tainted chocolate bars that have enough drops of the potion in them to turn them all into mice. On the other hand, hey, free chocolate!
By coincidence, Hero Boy also has a pet mouse that his Grandma gave him, he's been training it to do tricks - but he accidentally gets stuck in the room where the witches are having their meeting, and he watches as another boy staying at the hotel - an Augustus Gloop sort of kid, who loves his chocolate - gets turned into a mouse, and then the witches eventually smell the main character in the room, and they pour potion down his throat, too, and transform him as well.
This is about when this film starts to get very clunky - like when the hotel manager confirms very blatantly to the head witch that the meeting room only has one entrance, there's no other way out of the room. This was a very unnecessary bit of dialogue, the film essentially explains to the audience why the main character couldn't sneak out the back, but we didn't really care. As long as the boy didn't know there was a back exit, or how to find one, it really wouldn't matter. But the film insists on solving this problem for us, before it ever becomes a problem, and that's very clunky. It's like if a character pointed out in a line of dialogue that the curtains in the room are very flammable, and they must take care not to light a match or smoke near the curtains. The only reason any character would have this conversation would be to set up the plot point that somebody's going to light a match, and those curtains are going to catch on fire quickly, because that's what the story needs to have happen. It's a verbal fungo.
Another example of this is when our heroes decide to turn the tables, and Grandma and the mice decide to spike the pea soup that the witches are going to eat with the potion, thus turning all the witches into mice themselves. But adding the potion to the hotel's soup in the kitchen could mean turning some innocent bystanders who order the same soup into mice, so they have to add this line of dialogue about how the witches are all allergic to garlic, so the head witch has to request from the hotel manager that they be served pea soup WITHOUT garlic. And this would make the soup very bland, meaning that nobody else in the hotel dining room would want to order it, or they wouldn't be allowed to order it, which is even weirder, and now that I think about it, I don't think that garlic is a key ingredient in pea soup in the first place, so this is also a very, very clunky plot point. It has to happen so that ONLY the witches will drink the soup with the potion, but man, there just HAD to be a better way to get there. Why couldn't the mice just add the potion right before the kitchen served that table? Why do we need all this nonsense with the garlic / no garlic at all? It's just bizarre.
If you walked up to a deli counter and ordered some salami, and the deli guy said to you, "I can't serve this salami to you because it's a special order for one of my customers, and it's unique, and it's not poisoned in any way....anyway, you wouldn't like it." that would be very suspicious, wouldn't it?
Another example is the numbering of the hotel rooms, Hero Boy and Grandma are given the key to Room 766, which is on the fourth floor. Huh? Every hotel in the world numbers their rooms by floor, so therefore Room 766 should be on the seventh floor, right? Later on, the story dictates that their room needs to be right above the head witch's room, which is of course Room 666. So, room 666 is therefore on the third floor? Why did we need the line of dialogue telling us that 766 is on the fourth floor, what does that even get us? Why does it matter? Was the exterior shot of the hotel one of a building that wasn't seven stories high? WE DON'T EVEN CARE. Why couldn't their room be on the 7th floor, and why was the screenwriter trying to solve a problem that doesn't even seem to exist?
OH, there are so many more weird contradictions. Like if the head witch hates money so much, then why does she have a whole steamer trunk full of it? Makes no sense. Why doesn't anybody try to turn the mice back into children, since they know that mice have much shorter life expectancies than people? Couldn't they have blackmailed the head witch to cast a reversal spell, or provide an antidote, while they had her on the ropes? Nope, I guess the kids just like being mice? Clunky, clunky, clunky.
The final act, where they face off against the head witch, is similarly clunky, it reminds me of the ending of "Back to the Future III" where they have to put the Delorean in front of a train to go 88 mph and travel back to the present, but the train can't go fast enough, so they add special power sticks or something, then someone has to go back and save Doc Brown's girlfriend, hang off the side of the train, use the hoverboard, and it becomes a nearly never-ending chain of tiny little problems that all need to be solved just to bring about the required result. But I'm left thinking that there could have been an easier way to do it all. That film's from the same director as this one, Bob Zemeckis, so I wonder if he's got a think for Rube Goldberg-type devices. Now I'm going to go read the Trivia and Goofs sections on IMDB to see if I'm the only one bothered by these issues.
AH, now maybe I see why the film is no longer on HBO Max. There was some kind of controversy after depicting the witches as not having regular hands, instead they have only three fingers on each hand, and they're like elongated claws. This apparently was offensive to parents of children with limb differences or hand deformities, because it implies that anyone with differently shaped hands is a witch or inherently evil. Right. And nobody complained about the other things, the ways in which witches are shown trying to kill children, isn't this biased against people who practice the Wiccan religion? No issues there?
NITPICK POINT: Another one, of many - early on, according to Grandma's stories, witches are not humans, they're demons who have taken the shape of people. So, then, what's the guarantee that the potion's going to work on them, and turn them into mice? What if the potion only works on human physiology, and demons have some kind of different system, or a chemical or magical defense against such potions? Just saying.
Oh, and then I'm going to shut the blog down for a week. I'm going on vacation tomorrow, we're traveling down South ourselves, on the long-awaited and very delayed Birthday BBQ Crawl #3. Crawl #1 was in 2017, Crawl #2 was in 2018, and then in 2019 we changed it up and did a Casino Crawl across Las Vegas. Then came COVID, and we haven't had a decent vacation in three years, unless you count the week in Chicago last year, but then we were visiting my wife's brother, who moved there. Finally, we're back on the BBQ trail of our own design, and we'll be hitting Atlanta, Columbia SC and Raleigh NC. I know, I know, the horror film chain just really got rolling, and now it's on hold for a week. But this is why I started the scary movies early, with "Muppets Haunted Mansion" and "Morbius" in September, so I could take a week off now and still make it to Halloween on time. So just hang tight and I'll be back here on October 24.
Also starring Anne Hathaway (last seen in "Locked Down"), Stanley Tucci (last seen in "The King's Man"), Jahzir Bruno, Codie-Lei Eastick (last seen in "Holmes & Watson"), Charles Edwards (last seen in "An Ideal Husband"), Morgana Robinson, Josette Simon (last seen in "Cry Freedom"), Eugenia Caruso, Ana-Maria Maskell, Orla O'Rourke, Eurydice El-Etr, Penny Lisle, Simon Manyonda (last seen in "The Current War: Director's Cut"), Philippe Spall (last seen in "Judy"), Brian Bovell (last seen in "Tom & Jerry"), Jonathan Livingstone, Miranda Sarfo Peprah, Ashanti Prince-Asafo, Vivienne Acheampong, Sobowale Antonio Bamgbose, Angus Wright (last seen in "The Courier"), Dempsey Bovell, Paul Leonard (last seen in "Darkest Hour"), with the voices of Chris Rock (last seen in "Summer of Soul"), Kristin Chenoweth (last seen in "You Again")
RATING: 3 out of 10 galvanized nails (another bit of unnecessary dialogue that goes nowhere...)
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