13 FOR HALLOWEEN #9: Hocus Pocus

Real life kind of got in the way today, so here’s a short piece of fluff about a short piece of fluff, just to keep 13 For Halloween on track. There’ll be something better after the weekend … honest!

There are three genuinely terrifying things about ‘Hocus Pocus’:

1. Bette Midler’s hairdo.*

2. Kathy Najimy’s facial expressions.**

3. Realizing that, pre-‘Sex and the City’, Sarah Jessica Parker was actually quite fanciable.***

The story centres around three Salem witches – played by the above named ladies – who are hanged for kidnapping a child and draining her of her lifeforce in order to reverse the ageing process. As a peripheral casualty, the girl’s brother tangles with them prior to the arrival of the lynch mob and is cursed to eternal life as a black cat.

Fast forward 300 years and we’re in the early 90s (and boy does it show!) New kid in town Max (Omri Katz) bitches about giving up life in LA, tangles with two of the least threatening bullies ever brought to the screen – Jay (Tobias Jelinek) and Ernie (Larry Bagby) a white rapper wannabe who prefers to be addressed as ‘Ice’ – and is smitten by teen princess Alison (Vinessa Shaw). Meanwhile, all Max’s kid sister Dani (Thora Birch) wants to do is go trick or treating.

In an attempt to impress Alison, Max sets out to pooh-pooh the legend of the Sanderson sisters (Midler and co) but inadvertently brings them back to life. Max, Dani and Alison abscond with the sisters’ book of spells, which contains the conjuration they need to restore life fully (otherwise they’ll turn to ash come sun-up) and the three Sandersons set off in hot and decidedly supernatural pursuit.

That’s it, plotwise, apart from some business involving a zombie summoned from its grave to assist in retrieving the book and a talking cat who provides helpful exposition and – tying with the then 11-year old Thora Birch – gives the best performance.

Midler and co ham it up to the nines (although Parker generates some genuine giggles with her boy-crazy ditzy blonde turn), while brother and sister directors Garry and Penny Marshall turn in hilarious cameos as a suburban couple whose Halloween party is mistaken by the Sandersons as a Satanic ritual. This scene, playing brilliantly on the modern concept of Halloween as a subversion of everything the witchy sisters stand for, could have been the template for a much funnier and more roisterous film. However, the Disney banner and the family-friendly rating took precedence. ‘Hocus Pocus’ could have been bittersweet Halloween candy; as it is, it’s cheesier than a month-old chunk of gruyere.

*The dentistry came a very close second.

**Seriously, she does so much gurning that I spent the movie thinking ‘Kathy, quit it – if the wind changes you’ll stay that way and you aren’t going to be able to change back. You’re only playing a witch.’

***To SJP’s lawyers: I didn’t write this. Someone hacked my account and wrote this whole post without my knowledge. Really! I mean, c’mon, do you honestly think I’d review something like ‘Hocus Pocus’? It’s the blog equivalent of getting fraped.

PERSONAL FAVES: Ed Wood

Posted as part of Operation 101010
Category: biopics / In category: 10 of 10 / Overall: 96 of 100

Halfway through ‘Ed Wood’ – a film I saw at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema when it was first released in 1994 and have reapproached every three or four years since – I grabbed a pen, jotted a few words down and congratulated myself on a nifty opening line for this review:

“ ‘Ed Wood’ is what happens when a capable director makes a film about the life of an incapable director.”

Might need tightening, but hey-ho, good opener. I settled down to finish the movie, which has become like an old friend to me over the years, then fired up the laptop to start this review. I took another look at the sentence I’d jotted down and it struck me as inappropriate; a glib generalisation.

Tim Burton a “capable” filmmaker? Talk about damning with faint praise! Excuse me while I put my sniffy, academic, middle-aged Sight and Sound critic’s hat on!

Tim Burton, for want a better all-encompassing, single-word description, is an inspired director.

Nor is it completely accurate to deem Edward D. Wood Jnr “incapable”. Ed Wood was a man who made movies for virtually no budget, their runtimes padded with stock footage, his scripts tortuously contrived to incorporate said elements or explain away the non-existent production values; a man who peopled his opuses with actors who couldn’t act simply because they’d appear for free or they were his friends. A man who didn’t – unlike certain directors (no names mentioned, but dude your car insurance adverts are freakin’ annoying) – start out with the backing of a studio, some semblance of a budget, a script that could actually have worked and cast members who had proved themselves admirably elsewhere and still emerge with a stinker of epic proportions. Wood, too, can best be described as inspired – just in a different way.

Ed Wood (played with wide-eyed gleeful empathy by Johnny Depp) genuinely loves cinema; it’s something he aspires to even as his off-Broadway play (a belaboured wartime morality tale) dies a quiet death in a dingy theatre, its cast significantly more populated than the audience. The play’s a three-hander, by the way.

Encouraged by his long-time (and long-suffering) girlfriend Dolores Fuller (Sarah Jessica Parker), Wood battles to get his hastily penned genre scripts into production. As his bounces from commercial failure to critical failure (usually within the scope of the same movie), collects an entourage of fellow oddballs including supposed psychic Criswell (Jeffrey Jones), voluptuous late-night TV host Vampira (Lisa Marie), camp transsexual Bunny Breckinridge (Bill Murray in excelsis) and faded horror movie star Bela Lugosi (Martin Landau).

It’s the friendship between Wood and Lugosi that forms the emotional core of ‘Ed Wood’, Martin Landau bringing a heartfelt gravitas to his Oscar-winning performance as the elderly Lugosi. Landau provides the anchor upon which Depp’s typically expressive performance is held.

Late in the film – with Lugosi’s health failing and Dolores leaving Wood for the heinous sins of giving a lead role to another actress and having a penchant for wearing her undies and angora sweaters – Wood strikes up a tentative romance with the starry-eyed Kathy O’Hara (Patricia Arquette), a relationship which counterpoints Lugosi’s eventual and inevitable death. It’s from the last bit of footage he shot of Lugosi that Wood crafts his “masterpiece”, ‘Plan 9 From Outer Space’. Funded by a religious organisation deluded enough to think they’re putting their funds into an educational and gently improving blockbuster that will spread the word and swell their ranks, the title is hastily changed from the original ‘Grave Robbers From Outer Space’ when his backers express outrage at the concept of grave robbing.

Still, after much wrangling and a few inspirational words from his hero Orson Welles (Vincent D’Onofrio), Wood gets to make his movie – suffering his entire cast to be baptized in order to secure the funding – and declares it, as he and Kathy head to Las Vegas to get married, “the one I’ll be remembered for”.

He wasn’t wrong.