‘The Witches’ nails camp but fails to scare
The biggest strike against the remake of “The Witches” is that the original film from 1990 is just sitting there on Netflix waiting to be watched whenever you feel like it.
The second-biggest strike is that Robert Zemeckis, who directs the new film, seems to have forgotten one of the tenets of Roald Dahl, on whose novel the films are based: Kids love to be scared.
Dahl had other problems, plenty of them, but trusting kids to be able to handle horror wasn’t one of them. (It’s also more than possible he just didn’t care. But stay with me here.)
Why HBO Max’s ‘The Witches’ doesn’t live up to the original
Nicolas Roeg got it, in the 1990 version starring Angelica Huston. It’s not
“The Exorcist” or anything, but there are some frightening scenes that raise the stakes of the film, particularly for younger viewers.
Not so much in the new one, with Anne Hathaway as the Grand High Witch. It’s not like Huston’s performance didn’t have camp value. But Hathaway’s has little else.
Chris Rock narrates the story of a boy (Jahzir Bruno) whose parents are killed in a car accident. His grandmother (Octavia Spencer) takes him in and warns him of the danger of witches. They’re everywhere and they hate children, she tells him, so much that they want to kill them. Being a kid himself, the boy is understandably disturbed.
You can tell a witch because she doesn’t have toes, she always wears gloves because her hands are claws and she’s slick bald, wearing a wig that gives her sores on her head. (Yes, they’re all women. Misogyny is one of the knocks against the book.)
After a maybe-not-so-chance meeting with a witch in a store, the grandmother decides they must flee to a luxury hotel run by Mr. Stringer (Stanley Tucci). Unbeknownst to them, the Grand High Witch is convening a gathering of witches in that very hotel, to unveil her diabolical new plan to rid the world of pesky children by turning them into mice, whose unknowing parents will then kill them.
Anne Hathaway delivers camp but not creepiness
The boy stumbles into their meeting, along with his pet mouse (voice of Kristin Chenoweth, something that may be considered a spoiler) and his new friend Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick). It’s impossible to say much more without giving too much away, other than that the children and the boy’s grandmother must work to derail the Grand High Witch’s plans — and that certain magical witch-related developments make that more challenging than you’d think.
Like Huston before her, Hathaway goes big and broad with the Grand High Witch and has a grand old time of it. But where Huston’s transformation was genuinely creepy, Hathaway just kind of looks like a bald Anne Hathaway.
That is literally cosmetic, however. What’s more important and less satisfying is the absence of the dark vibe the film demands. Maybe it’s aimed at younger children than the original (and certainly the book), but Zemeckis, a cowriter of the script, sweetens the story too much. (You’d think with Guillermo del Toro credited as a writer as well that it might have been scarier.)
There is an element of sadness to this story that’s necessary to make it effective. Take that away and you’re left with a cute kids’ tale that doesn’t trust younger audiences to process the elements that can be difficult — and that make it better.
C’mon, kids can take it. But only you give them the chance to.
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