The Witches

 What happened to my good movie year? I had a lot of good movies lined up to see this year and now, zilch. My movie year's been cursed. Must have been a witch.

Yeah, witches.

Now that my family has HBOMax, it's time to make my comeback with another Roald Dahl cinematic rendering. The Witches was already conjured to the cinematic plane in 1990. A film best remembered for its main villain, creepy PG-rated special effects and makeup work and driving the terminally ill Dahl to publicly protest its altered ending. Wonder how he'd take to this rendering?

The unnamed narrator (Chris Rock) tells the audience about his youth. As an orphan boy (Jahzir Kadeem Bruno), he's sent to his also unnamed grandma (Octavia Spencer) in Alabama. He encounters an obviously evil lady offering him candy, but he doesn't fall for it. Good call. The lady, as grandma explains, is a witch who seek to rid the world of kids. Grandma and Grandson head for a hotel for safety.

Unfortunately, they arrive in time for a convention of witches led by The Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway) herself. She plans to turn all the kids in the world into mice. She demonstrates her new mousifying potion on another kid, Bruno (Codie-Lei Eastick) and then, the narrator himself. The rest of the movie is about them, a fellow mousified kid named Mary (Kristin Chenoweth), and Grandma as they prevent the witches from enacting their plot even further.

Director Robert Zemeckis cowrote the film with Guillermo Del Toro and Kenya Barris. Anyone who's seen the first film will recognize the same story beats albeit with some divergences. Its ending is closer to Dahl's. Its first 45 minutes or so go by pretty quickly thanks to good acting from Spencer and Bruno. Its special effects whiplash the film's tone, though. Some scenes are scary (see Grandma's friend Alice get chickenized), while some are silly (mousified victims get rocketed into the air). The digital creatures are just too obvious. Overall, it's nowhere near as nightmarish as the first film.

The other technical elements mix together better. Gary Freeman's production design and Don Burgess's cinematography paint a suitably gothic picture. The Hotel and Grandma's house make for memorable locations. The makeup department conjurs up creepy images for the Witches' true forms. While their three-clawed hands and fanged Glasgow grins are CGI, I can't tell if their toeless feet are. Let's not forget another great score from Alan Silvestri to set the intended tone.

Let's talk about some of the stars. Hathaway as The Grand High Witch is best when she's subtle. She vaporizes a Witch who asked her about the logistics of her plot and only a second later considers it a valid point. Her Grand High Villain Speech a bit earlier is a bit much, especially with her flying and her Glasgow fangs. Spencer as Grandma is equally warm and formidable. As stated before, her bonding with her Grandson helps make the time go by. And finally, Stanley Tucci makes the most of his smaller screentime as hotel manager Mr. Springer.

If anything, this version of The Witches is an ok enough representation of the story. A bit more work on the visual effects could've helped the verisimilitude. But there's still some creepiness in the cauldron. It's a decent home matinee if you have HBOMax. For everyone else, there's regular HBO or eventual physical media.