Harefooted Halloween: The Witches

What I Liked: The first half is pretty dark, especially for a kids movie.

All of the makeup effects look great even though they can get kinda cartoony at times.

Anjelica Huston (The Addams Family) gives an over the top performance as the Grand High Witch that’s damn fun to watch.  She has a spooky witch look to her to begin with so the casting was spot on for this role.

The supporting players are excellent.  Bruno’s father was particularly entertaining.  The guy is such a dick with his constant complaining and arrogant attitude.  I could watch a whole film of just him and the Grand High Witch sharing awkward scenes together.

What I Didn’t Like: Unfortunately the second half really turns on the kid movie-ness with cute mice animatronics and general shenanigans.

This may seem kinda mean but the lead kid who plays Luke is not a very good actor.  He’s better when he doesn’t say anything because I do think his facial expressions are good.  However, he’s…uhh…sorta terrible with his dialogue.

The makeup and costume job they did for the Grand High Witch looks outstanding but we only get it for one scene.  It would’ve made sense to have her come back into her natural gruesome form at the end for the finale.  But they didn’t do that which leads to the next problem…

*Spoiler on this last point* There’s no final battle.  I guess it’s just how the book went (this was based off Roald Dahl’s book of the same name) but it doesn’t work very well, at least in film form.  The thing ends kind of unsatisfactorily with one of the supporting characters killing the Grand High Witch in her tiny rat form.  That’s bullshit.  Luke’s grandmother should’ve fought her.  She would’ve settled a decades old score by getting payback for the pinky the witch took from her (that’s another problem, albeit a minor one, we never learn how the grandmother lost her pinky to a witch).  I’m sure budgetary restraints plus an effort to follow the book prevented a bigger and more fitting ending from materializing.

Overall Impression: I remember this being kinda creepy when it came out and all these years later a bunch of that creepiness remains.  The first half is really good and surprisingly dark. 

I love that they start by telling us how witches work in this movie’s universe.  They throw in a lot of great details but some of them don’t even come into play, like that witches have no toes.  Really though, the atmosphere is well set.

The bravado of this picture is kind of astounding if you step back for a minute and think about it.  I mean one thing they do is kill off the parents after introducing them at the beginning of the film (that’s not a spoiler by the way).  That’s one of the ballsiest moves I’ve ever seen in a kids movie.  Usually if the parents are dead then they died before the movie starts and they totally could’ve done that here.  But no.  They wanted you see them alive and well and then kill them off a minute later.

There’s also the Grand High Witch’s maniacal plot of killing off every child in England.  She doesn’t merely want to murder more children than the year before, she wants to exterminate them.  This notion along with how the Grand High Witch rallies the crowd with sweeping speaking power and the eastern European accent and well…she’s Hitler essentially.  I wonder if that was how Dahl wrote the character or if that’s what they intentionally went with for the film or if it was unintentional or what.  And I really don’t think this is a stretch.  This character is clearly modeled after Hitler.  Again, kinda dark for a kids movie if you ask me.

If you also throw in shit like the kids convulse while they turn into mice and the Grand High Witch pushes a baby carriage down a hill potentially to its death just to lure out Luke from hiding then you got a pretty tilted production.

It’s no surprise that this wasn’t a hit and that it remains somewhat obscure to this day.  It doesn’t get romanticized like other non-hits from the same era like The Monster Squad or Near Dark.  Instead this one got quietly swept under the carpet.

Look, The Witches is no masterpiece but the first half alone is worth checking out for its eerie and somewhat unconventional setup.  If you’re looking for something that isn’t very scary but at the same time has a bit of a nasty edge then this just might be the ticket.