Hocus Pocus

Kenny Ortega, 1993
Rotten Tomatoes score: 30%

In 1993, a once fearsome being, with wild hair the color of damnation, reemerged and used her spectacular powers in an attempt to reclaim the glory of her lost youth. But enough about Bette Midler, let's talk about the movie.

All right, all right, I've made jokes like that before, and I feel sort of bad doing it. But really, I don't think Bette Midler has to worry about jibes from the likes of me. She's got four Golden Globes, three Grammys, three Emmys, a Tony, and about 900 gold records. She starred in the musical version of Rochelle, Rochelle (a young girl's strange erotic journey from Milan to Minsk).

And she did this:

God, what an entertainer.

Hocus Pocus begins in October 1693, at the height of the Salem witch trials. (Actually, Wikipedia tells me the trials ended in May, so I guess this one ran long.) You may have heard that the witch trials were a humanitarian abomination, where innocent people were persecuted by a Puritan establishment whose members only recently had escaped persecution themselves, a hideous irony that stands as a monument to the dangers of ignorance, superstition and bigotry.

Well, you're not going to believe this. It turns out the accused actually were witches, who terrorized the townspeople with their Satanic powers, and their executioners did us all a tremendous favor.

Unfortunately, the worst witches got one over on them. After being arrested for killing young Emily Binx and transforming her brother Thackery into a housecat, but before the hangman had a chance to do them in, the Sanderson sisters (Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker) called upon the Dark Prince to make it so that they would return to life some day in the far future.

Three hundred years later, we meet teenager Max Dennison (Omri Katz) and his sister Dani (Thora Birch), who recently moved to Salem from Southern California. Max is a cool, easy-going dude, but when he questions the existence of witches, his classmates and teacher upbraid him for his heresy. Not only that, but two bullies (who strangely look much more like stereotypical California guys than Max does) steal his cool shoes.

But things start to look up for Max when he and Dani visit a Halloween party at the home of Max's dream girl Allison. Allison's parents just so happen to be the proprietors of a museum in the old Sanderson mansion, so the kids decide to skip the party and try to bring the witches back to life instead. To their surprise, they are immediately successful, and once the Sandersons return from the Beyond to steal the souls of children, the gang spends the next hour or so trying, with the help of the feline Thackery Binx, to... I guess kill them. I mean, that sounds very disturbing, but it is what they're trying to do.

There's actually a lot of disturbing stuff in this movie. For example, there's a scene where Bette Midler brings a dead person back to life, and he climbs out of the ground as a shambling, visibly rotting corpse. (But since we're told he comes from 1693, shouldn't he be completely disintegrated by now? And wait, why don't the Sandersons also look like corpses? Are they ghosts, or—sorry, forget it.)

Then there's the part where the kids lure the witches into the high school art classroom, lock them in the clay-firing kiln and immolate them. It doesn't work—I mean, it works, but they come right back to life—but I really don't think I can remember another kids' movie from my own lifetime where children incinerate three people.

And what about the bullies? The witches lock them in a cage toward the end, and we're never told whether they survive or not. I guess they're dead. But at least Max got his cool shoes back.

Eventually, the plot tactfully allows the witches to die without being directly murdered by the kids. Instead, they simply burst into sparkly dust when the sun comes up on November 1. (Actually, Bette Midler first turns into a pillar of salt, then bursts into sparkly dust.) This follows some plot points that always confused me where they first have to fool the witches into thinking the sun has come up by shining a car's headlights through the window of the museum.

The ghost of Thackery Binx is freed from the cat's body and rejoins the spirit of his sister, who may or may not have spent the last 300 years wandering back and forth in a field shouting "Thackery" over and over again. They walk through a gate that opens for them, as if by magic, but it's not the gates of heaven or anything; it's an actual, physical gate in a field in Salem, Massachusetts. I don't know what that was about.

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Usually I try to decide whether a movie is over- or underrated on the basis of its Rotten Tomatoes score. In a case like this, I'm not sure that makes sense. Hocus Pocus was panned by critics when it came out, but I don't know anyone who remembers this movie and doesn't like it. I guess I should take this huge change in public opinion into account in my highly rigorous rating system. But then on the other hand, I don't feel like it.

Did you know?

1. Thackery Binx, in human form, is played by Sean Murray from NCIS. If you don't know what NCIS is, just ask your dad. It's his favorite show. But Binx's voice, in both human and feline form, is Jason Marsden. And if you don't know who Jason Marsden is, he's the guy who played the best friend on every single thing you ever watched on TV from 1992 to 1998.

2. The man dressed as the devil, who hits on the Sanderson sisters, is played by Garry Marshall, and his wife is played by Garry's real-life sister Penny Marshall. Who was responsible for that casting decision?

3. Here's Bette Midler performing "I Put a Spell on You" at the age of 69:

She's still got it.