Member review

My triumphant return to an actual cinema found me watching this 1993 Disney cheese (I never saw it before it, I swear). The film's trailer was very prominent back in the day & since the film wasn’t aimed at my demographic, I safely skipped it but since I needed a top half of my double feature (more on that later) I figured necessity is the mother of invention (or desperation) so I hunkered down for 90 minutes I would never get again. A trio of witches (Bette Midler, Kathy Najimi, Sarah Jessica Parker) are hung for their crimes during the Salem witch trials but not before they kill a young girl (taking her life essence to make themselves look younger) & changing a girl’s brother into an immortal cat. Flash forward to modern 90’s times & we find ourselves in the midst of a high schooler (recently arrived w/his family to town) getting shot down romantically as he makes a play for the girl, played by Vinessa Shaw, but she still has a smile on her face so things may change. On the way home, he gets accosted by a couple of lame white hip hop kids (who steal his sneaks) & arriving home he finds he has to take his younger sister, played by Thora Birch (recently seen on The Walking Dead), out trick or treating that night but no sooner do they start their night they meet up w/the hip hop kids' crew & eventually making it to Shaw’s home where w/Birch, become a trio where they find themselves at a museum (which celebrates the dead witches) & due to a plot contrivance, a black candle is lit & the witches are released w/their goal being to entice children to them so they can again imbibe their essence & become immortal in the process or die when the sun rises. Kenny Ortega (a hot choreographer at the time for his work on Dirty Dancing) got a lot of flack for this film (which was especially savaged by critics at the time) & it is typical of his films, largely passable w/just enough of everything to be classified as film but nothing especially memorable (hey it continues to work for him since he’s behind the mega-successes of the High School/Descendants musical trilogies) but other than really young kids, no one else will get anything out of this. Look for humorous cameos by brother/sister directors, Garry Marshall & sister Penny (both who have sadly passed) as Halloween revelers the witches visit, Charles Rocket (an infamous SNL’er who got fired for cursing on air & later in life sadly committed suicide) as the lead’s father, Doug Jones (the man behind many a monster suit) as a resurrected zombie & Kathleen Freeman (the nun from the Blues Brothers films) playing a History teacher.