#neil cuthbert

𝓗𝓸𝓬𝓾𝓼 𝓟𝓸𝓬𝓾𝓼 𝓼𝓽𝓪𝓻𝓻𝓲𝓷𝓰 𝓑𝓮𝓽𝓽𝓮 𝓜𝓲𝓭𝓵𝓮𝓻, 𝓢𝓪𝓻𝓪𝓱 𝓙𝓮𝓼𝓼𝓲𝓬𝓪 𝓟𝓪𝓻𝓴𝓮𝓻, & 𝓚𝓪𝓽𝓱𝔂 𝓝𝓪𝓳𝓲𝓶𝔂 𝓞𝓹𝓮𝓷𝓮𝓭 𝓘𝓷 𝓣𝓱𝓮𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓼 33 𝓨𝓮𝓪𝓻𝓼 𝓐𝓰𝓸, 𝓙𝓾𝓵𝔂 16, 1993!!!

ESE: 100/100

I knew that I would not like this movie. I didn't see it as a kid, because we didn't have cable, but it's hard for me to imagine that it would have struck me positively. It's not that I was so sophisticated, but I liked my children's entertainment with a dash of darkness, or at least something challenging--especially if it was supposed to be somehow horror-adjacent. For me, things had to be at least on the level of  LABYRINTH, with its various ambivalent creatures and monster sexuality in the person of David Bowie, or LEGEND, with its various ambivalent creatures and actually-monstrous sexuality in the person of Tim Curry, or...whatever other children's fare there is, that expects a little extra substance from its child audience, that's a little sexy and a little scary, and basically, at least kind of cool. And I'm not being a snob; you can say these same things about a lot of classic Disney movies. But in spite of its dual status as both a Disney- and cult classic, HOCUS POCUS is not at all cool. Just because it's such a Halloween thing for people, I figured I would watch it for Blogtober this year, and I have to say...I still don't get it.

I do not often feel my age, as my continued presence on Tumblr attests. There are just a few things that starkly separate me from my near-peers. One of them is Pokemon; when someone who seems like they're more or less my contemporary starts speaking in a personal way about Pokemon, I know that they're on the exact other side of some invisible dividing line in time. Another sign is enthusiasm for a certain stripe of Nickelodeon production, that mainly seems to feature a lot of shrill screaming and strobing lights and baby talk, in shows I didn't grow up with so I'll never understand what's good about them. It appears to me that HOCUS POCUS is part of the trend here: folks slightly younger than me, who saw it every October on the Disney Channel, seem to really get whatever the appeal of this is.

It is somehow telling that nearly every screencap I could find from this movie is just of these three standing in a row and filling the screen. Like it’s basically the entire visual character of the movie.

What "this" is, is a movie about a kid from LA (Omri Katz) who moves to Salem, Mass, just in time to unwittingly light a ceremonial candle on a Halloween full moon (which we are about to have BTW!), which brings the evil Sanderson Sisters back from the dead. These villains (not victims, VILLAINS) of Salem's witch hunt era can't understand really basic shit like whether plastic tubes are "snakes" or whether asphalt is black water or various other things that should be pretty visually obvious even if you're from the 1600s, but the truth is that it doesn't really matter what they think or feel, because they're just here to shriek and mug and jiggle around and do unwelcome musical numbers. At this point, I really have to apologize; I usually harness myself to the task of thoughtfully describing whatever movie I've assigned myself, no matter what I expect from it, but this was just really difficult.

Ew.

I've read that this movie was originally conceived as more of a kid-friendly horror movie, but it eventually morphed into something more satisfying to the Mouse. Various themes emerge and evaporate, expressing nothing. The "cool" LA native is actually a virgin, which is why his lighting the candle resurrects the witches, but instead of this triggering a coming of age narrative, it just becomes a reason to awkwardly repeat the word "virgin" over and over. Nothing in particular is contributed to our understanding of this character, and I had to wonder if some christian parents' group threatened to picket Disney's witch movie unless it harped on a random virtue like virginity. That would actually follow, given that HOCUS POCUS is a movie that casually sides with witch hunters whose religious mania and misogyny caused the deaths of at least 25 people during the era in which the hilariously kooky Sanderson Sisters are meant to have terrorized the town. Meanwhile, in modern times, their goal is to "steal the lives" of children to create an immortality potion. I don't know why they have to keep saying "steal their lives". It makes no sense to me. I get that maybe they can't say that the Sandersons KILL children--I know this isn't WARLOCK. But it's not even THE WITCHES, in either the Roeg or Zemeckis version; you have little idea what they do to the children. You'd think they could say "steal their souls", or something else that we vaguely understand from watching a lot of movies, but no. HOCUS POCUS just asks a lot from me, in terms of my ability to find it interesting that witches are running around and they must be stopped.

The witches’ grimoire, the best part of the movie, doesn’t have nearly enough to do.

The witches, Kathy Najimy, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Bette Midler, really just run around screaming for most of the movie. I would agree that this must be stopped, and I only regret that it took like 96 minutes for this to happen. I don't even blame the ladies for this movie's lack of charisma; it's pretty clear that they're just doing what a movie this loud and tacky requires. And at my most open-minded, I can acknowledge that it's good for little kids to see female characters who are wacky and confident, and not at all sexy or romantic. But I don't find any of this at all fun, personally. I don't care about the LA virgin who is dressed as a "rap singer" for Halloween, even though he looks more like a white separatist in his fatigue green bomber jacket and dad jeans. I don't care about the talking cat, voiced by Disney standby Jason Marsden who is not really up to the task of doing a british accent. I don't care about bland hot chick Vinessa Shaw, or the cool kid's spunky kid sister, even if she is played by Thora Birch. Doug Jones makes an appearance as a friendly zombie, which could have been fun, but...I shouldn't be surprised that it isn't.

Actually, the only thing I found at all provocative about HOCUS POCUS was the bullies. At first, I did not understand that they were supposed to be bullies. Wannabe rapper "Ice" and his buddy Jay, who by all appearances should be looking around for a church to burn, are unlikely friends and even unlikelier neighborhood threats. When I first saw them, I thought maybe they were going to be the hero's new pals--misfits like himself who have nothing in common but their misfit-ness. But then they shake the kid down for money, and ruin Halloween for little trick-or-treaters, and it's like...oh, these are "bad guys"? Why? Who would ever put up with them? I was alive in a small town during the time that this movie is supposed to take place, and I was very aware of scary teenagers then. The guys in this movie would never have been taken seriously, regardless of physical ability, and worse than that, they do not serve any purpose in this purposeless narrative. Anyway, it's pretty obvious that I don't have much to say about HOCUS POCUS, and watching it was basically a mistake. However, I do have one nutritious morsel to leave you with, courtesy iMDB's trivia page. You can all take heart in the fact that even a really dumb, useless movie can sometimes reveal something about life that you never imagined:

Sarah Jessica Parker dijo esto en una publicación que hizo en Instagram este fin de semana “Todos hemos dicho que sí. Ahora esperamos.”

Esto es una buena noticia porque, la idea de un HOCUS POCUS 2 sin el elenco original (Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker y Kathy Najimy) es una pérdida de tiempo.

HOCUS POCUS (Abracadabra 1993) fue dirigida por Kenny Ortega, con un guion de Neil Cuthbert y Mick Garris. Y estuvo protagonizada por Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, Sarah Jessica Parker, Omri Katz, Thora Birch y Vinessa Shaw, con Jason Marsden como la voz de Binx y Doug Jones como Billy Butcherson.

Dato Curioso: Thackery Binx que es interpretado por dos actores diferentes.   En la escena de apertura y cierre, Thackery es interpretado por el actor Sean Murray.  Sin embargo, la voz de Thackery es realizada por el actor de voz Jason Marsden, y no solo cuando es Binx está transformado en gato, también expresa todas las líneas de Sean Murray.