archcorenth

This film is no better or worse than the first Hocus Pocus, which is to say it's an enjoyable evening's entertainment, leaving you with a smile, and easily forgotten about by the morning. What it is definitely not is a subversive cult film for people to be obsessed for for over two decades.

I really don't get what there is here that is controversial. Both films are more or less reimaginings of Hansel and Gretel. The witches set their sites on eating some kids, and the kids outsmart and trick them at every turn, usually with mildly humorous results. The witches are fun. The each have a role, one witch tracks the children, one lures the children, and one prepares them for consumption, and each role suggests a personality for the three actress, who seem to have great fun chewing the scenery. It's the fun they have that puts you in a good mood more than any particular jokes.

The kids this time are downright boring. The first go round, we were given Thora Birch and the kid from Eerie Indiana. I would be shocked if we saw any of these three again. I don't think I even learned their names, they were just girl 1, girl 2, and girl 3. Faring better are two more minor children. In a flashback at the beginning we see a little girl version of the head witch who mimics Bette Midler perfectly. Also, girl 3's boyfriend has some energy that makes you wish he'd be in the movie for than the three drips.

Speaking of the kids the moral of their story is bizarre. Girl 3 has moved outside of her childhood friends and started dating a star athlete. This makes girl 1 extremely jealous. In the early scenes we see girl 3 and the boyfriend attempt to keep including them in things, but girl 1 always reacts with hostility. Well, it seems the moral of this situation seemed plain to me, but I wonder if you'll be as baffled by what they went with instead as I was.

Towards the beginning of this movie the main character, who is a podcaster, has a conversation with his editor where he tells her he has all kinds of things he wants to say, and she tells him that he needs a story in order to say them.

This is the resulting story.

Basically, B. J. Novak has a number of little speeches that live somewhere between a rant and lecture that he wants to say, and the movie provides him a vehicle to get from one to the next. I'm not saying that none of these are interest or valuable, but the story simply isn't strong enough to get to take them to heart. And worse than that, B. J. Novak isn't really a good enough actor to get you to buy the choices his character makes in the more dramatic scenes at the movie's end.

The movie this is most similar to is David Byrne's True Stories, one of my favorite movies of all time. That movie has a similar setting, some of the rants the characters go on have an almost eerily similar ring (Spalding Gray and Ashton Kutcher's speeches in particular seem to be different takes on the same thing). But True Stories doesn't have a plot at all. Maybe that's the problem with this film. B. J. Novak shouldn't have taken his editor's advice. Let someone who has a story to tell, tell a story. B. J. Novak would have been better off just driving around the heartland interviewing eccentric characters.

I'm wondering if I'm being a little harsh with my rating this time because there are some good things here, but when I comes right down to it, this is a horror movie completely lacking in scare and suspense. Usually, that is because you don't care about the characters, "So what if this or that air head gets picked off," you say to yourself and disengage from the whole thing. But in this film, I did kind of care about them. I wanted the sister and brother to come to some kind of understanding and they were both fairly good actors. Perhaps the problem is that they were the only good actors. Who could possibly care about the sister and brother's significant others or the roommate whom I didn't know one thing about throughout the entire film.

There were other problems, too. The villains are too fantastic, so it's hard to take the situation seriously. You never know what the rules are and if anything can happen there's no way for you to put yourself into the situation to figure out what you would do.

I did not come to this film as a fan of the franchise. I do kind of like Clive Barker's writing, I very much enjoyed The Thief of Always as a kid and I've liked the adult things of his I've read. But the only Clive Barker movie I've cared for was the original Candyman (and that is just the best of all slasher movies), but the first Hellraiser has some major problems too. Some of the same problems. This sequel does do one thing better than the original, however. In the original, you're given all the weird characters and told all about their problems, but then they are just killed one-by-one, problems solved! I felt like, why did I bother getting involved in theses people's lives. In this one, at least, the story is the main girl's story, and her issues with her brother are worked out through the movie's more fantastic events.