a paragraph on THE WITCHES

Where viewed: standard def DVD on the couch
Experience with Film: didn’t even know it existed–read the book as a kid, didn’t remember much of it

Writer: Allan Scott
Director: Nicolas Roeg
Principal Actors: Anjelica Huston, Mai Zetterling, Jasen Fisher

Ungentle children’s movies are the best. Stories that don’t condescend, have real stakes, and are a little brutal. This is definitely one of those films. Roald Dahl meets Labyrinth-esque Jim Henson with a vamping Anjelica Huston, terrible child actors, and a lot of shots of mice running around cleverly constructed sets. And it’s unsparingly violent despite it’s PG rating. Quick synopsis: witches exist, disguised, around the world. They hate children and plan to dispose of them. All of them. At a sort of witch conference at a seaside hotel, the Grand High Witch (Huston) hatches a plan to turn all of England’s children into mice using a magic potion. She tests the potion on our dullard of a red-headed protagonist and his fat friend. It works. BUT, with the help of a German (?) grandmother, all the witches are tricked into ingesting the potion, turning them all into mice instead. And then the hotel patrons and staff begin MURDERING THE WITCH-MICE. At one point, the hotel manager, played by Mr. Bean, starts brandishing a bloody meat cleaver. Bloody from murdering witch-mice. This scene is in addition to Anjelica Huston trying to push a baby off a cliff, Anjelica Huston stomping on one of her mice-witch minions which is accompanied with a fart sound and green goo splattering all over, and probably the most harrowing part of the film, which is when our now-mousified protagonist says he doesn’t mind being vermin and then asks his grandmother how long mice live. Not long, buddy. Nothing like staring into the ceaseless void to warm a child’s heart. But this kind of bleakness makes the story memorable. The world isn’t always a comfortable place–it can be dangerous, unfair, and cruel. It’s a shame the movie got a deus ex machina ending where our dullard red-headed hero gets changed back into a kid. Hollywood happy strikes again.