Reality Yesterday

The dark sequel to the classic Wizard of Oz musical carefully constructed out of pure nightmare fuel. If you thought the original had too much singing and not enough commentary on the horrors of early 20th century psychiatry, then this might be the movie for you.

Nostalgia Warning

I saw this movie in the theatres when I was a small child. I’m sure my parents had no clue that this movie would be so dark. The opening 20 minutes were so traumatising that I still remembered it more than 30 years later. In fact, I still remembered huge chunks of this movie, which I can’t say for some movies I watched 10 years ago, let alone 30. Is Return to Oz as needlessly dark as I remember it? Is it as big a failure as the box office figures suggest, or is this a hidden classic? Let’s find out!

Showtime!

6 months after Dorothy had her grand adventure in Oz (or 46 years - time is relative y’all), Aunty Em and Uncle Henry are worried about their young niece. Not only will she not stop talking about these fantasy characters that are a clear sign of a mental disorder, she’s somehow de-aged by about 10 years. Finding a mysterious key is either a sign that Dorothy is about to take another trip to Oz or that she’s about to lose her last grasp at sanity and is about to descend into a psychotic hellscape from which there will be no return, so it’s time to ship her off to a mental health clinic and cure her with the healing powers of electroshock therapy.

During a blackout, Dorothy manages to escape from the shock machine with the creepy face and after nearly drowning, finds herself back in Oz. If things looked bleak back in the crazy house, things aren’t much better in Oz, where the place is in ruins and everyone has been turned to stone. Dorothy gathers new companions Billina the Chicken, Jack Pumpkinhead, Tik-Tok the Clockwork Man and the Gump, faces off against the fluro-punk Wheelers, head-stealing witch Mombi and poorly animated Gnome King, all in a last ditch effort to save the people of Oz and uncover the secret of Princess Ozma.

Cards on the table: I love the Oz books but I do not love the old school Wizard of Oz movie. Don’t get me wrong, the music, visuals and acting are great. It’s the framing sequences back in Kansas that ruin it for me. Dorothy goes on this massive quest where she overcomes incredible challenges, inspires people to greatness and delivers an entire country from the clutches of an evil being. Then she gets home to Kansas and it turns out it was all a hallucination caused by a bang to the head and all the people she met in Oz were just caricatures of people she knew back in Kansas. What a way to ruin an epic adventure. So I got nervous when the same thing started happening in Return to Oz. The film tries way too hard to stuff references to all the upcoming events in Oz into the opening Kansas scenes. It’s done so poorly that I wonder if the director actually wanted to pursue this route or if he was forced into it. The squeaky wheels of the hospital trolleys sounding just like the sound the Wheelers make is one thing. I can almost understand the doctor and nurse being played by the actors playing the Gnome King and Mombi (though we are never given any reason why the hospital had to be EVIL in all capital letters. Could that nurses outfit scream gothic supervillain any harder?). But when you have a random girl, who may or may not exist, bring Dorothy a carved jack o’lantern pumpkin, and it isn’t even Halloween, then you’ve gone too far. And the thing is, the movie doesn’t need all this Oz foreshadowing. It doesn’t even do anything with it. In fact, I believe the movie would have been stronger if we had skipped the psych ward all together, had Dorothy find the key, get lost in a storm and begin her Oz adventure 15 minutes sooner. Then maybe we could have spent more time establishing the Princess Ozma mystery instead of dumping it all in the last 10 minutes.

There is some truly great stuff going on here. The ruins of Oz are wonderfully shot and I would love to spend time running around and exploring. The puppet work on display with Jack and Tik-Tok is amazing. Tik-Tok is my favourite Oz character and he doesn’t disappoint on screen. And what Brian Henson does with both Jack’s voice and his physicality just knocks it out of the park. The villains are scary, the plot is substantial and Dorothy’s eventual victory feels earned. But there are some weaknesses. The Gnome King looks great when he’s a human actor in makeup. But as soon as he becomes an animated special effect, it instantly dates the movie. The Gnomes never look right, which is more a limitation of 1980s special effects than poor filmmaking. Whoever composed the score must not have got the memo that they were composing a kids action adventure flick and not a gothic horror movie because it’s 100% dread and 0% fun. And I sure hope gravity works different in Oz than in the real world because whenever someone falls in this movie it takes forever and looks like someone is dangling a pumpkin on fishing wire instead of simulating a rapid descent. 

Return to Oz smooshes together all the best bits about the books The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz. Unfortunately it also throws in the elements of the 1939 movie I like the least. The result is a movie where it was clear that not everyone was on the same page when it came to the tone or purpose of this film. 

Was It Any Good?