The Witches

The Witches (1990)

--Nicolas Roeg

So, this is what I got stuck with for halloween, instead of "Hocus Pocus". Actually it was the day after halloween, but that was okay.

Ummm, this may have been the worst film I've ever seen. It's about a group of witches who sometimes eat/kill/something children and they have a conference at a hotel to talk about how to turn all the children in London (I'm pretty sure it's London) into mice. So there's this kid who's parents maybe were killed or something and he's living with his grandma who is familiar with these witches. His grandma has to take a break for health reasons, so they end up at the same hotel as this conference and the kid ends up in the same room with the witches. Then he and this other kid get turned into mice and the escape the witches who are trying to kill them. They run to the kid's grandma and form a plan to turn all of the witches into mice by putting their mice-transformation serum into some food that they will be eating.

Yeah, I don't know what it is about this film. Maybe it was the grotesqueness of the costumes of the witches. This film is rated PG, but that scene was really scary. I can imagine a small child freaking out over the witches tearing off their skin and mutating into monsters. I think after that scene the movie just died for me. I just didn't like it, thought it was gross, obviously I already came in knowing about the usual stereotypical portrayal of witches but I'm able to overlook that most films and just accept that they are portrayed as ugly evil creatures.

I'm also just not interested in a story about a mouse-child-thing running around with his grandmother doing crap. That just sounds like a film that I would never want to watch. It may have been better for me had the kid not spent the majority of the film as a mouse, I don't really enjoy those kinds of films most of the time. Now if he were turned into a nice little kitty... I still wouldn't want to watch over and hour of that crap.

This film wasn't for me. If you like stereotypical satan-worshipping witches, grandmother/grandson plots, and kids getting turned into mice, then you'll like this. I really thought the movie was going to go in a different direction, the first part of the film was definitely interesting. The grandmother's story about the kid that she knew that had been taken by witches and then ended up in a family portrait where her family could watch her age and then die like a regular human, really intrigued me and I wanted to know more. But after they went to the hotel, the plot went to crap. I didn't like it at all. It was both grotesque and horrific and too childish all at the same time. And the ending was really random. I didn't see it going that way at all. For awhile I was convinced that the grandmother was going to turn out to be a witch, which might have redeemed the film somewhat for me, but instead she was apparently just a normal woman, oh well.

Anyway, I don't recommend this film. I personally thought it was really horrible, but then again sometimes I like really stupid films that are objectively pretty crappy. Maybe this was a genious film and I just didn't get it. But hey, it was available to be rented on halloween (the only halloween-related film, not tv, available for rent at that time so maybe I'm not the only one?).