The Witches, a once in a Generation Nightmare
Fun fact about Bud, I have three daughters and having daughters means that quite often, there is some happy go lucky, feel good, girly princess movie playing on the television. My daughter’s range in age from 17 to 8 so I’ve had the pleasure of seeing every girly main character heroine from the Cheetah Girls to Cadet Kelly and everything in between. One face I have seen a billion, million times is Anne Hathaway.
It all started with 2001’s The Princess Diaries following Hathaway as young Mia Thermopolis whose life is transformed when she finds out she is the heir to the crown of the small country of Genovia. As modern “Oh snap, I’m awkward and now I need to be a Princess” movies go, The Princess Diaries ranks somewhere between Miss Congeniality and the Drew Barrymore Cinderella movie, Ever After. The Hathaway plague upon my house continued with 2004’s double header of princess films as she returned as Thermopolis in The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement and Ella Enchanted. By the time 2020 rolled around, I have seen Anne Hathaway get approximately 1,500 makeovers, fall off of a horse 1,200 times, kiss prince charming to an emotional early ‘2000s pop song 1,000 times and get sweet, sweet revenge on her high school bully played by Mandy Moore enough times that it is no longer satisfying. All these times I have seen Anne Hathaway could not prepare me for seeing her in 2020’s HBO Max exclusive, The Witches.
Anne Hathaway as The Grand High Witch is the absolute most terrifying thing you will ever experience in a movie made for kids...fuck that, maybe the most terrifying thing you will ever experience in a movie period. First there is the wide monstrous smile filled with sharp pointy teeth and the bifurcated tongue, then there’s the bald scabby head that she pulls worms out of and eats. She has weird talons for hands, one long sharp toe and a golden snake broach on her dress that’s alive. If that wasn’t enough to freak you out, she does this crazy shit with her voice that reminds me of Brad Dourif in The Exorcist III. Her normal voice shifts and a teeth gnashing snarl comes out as she speaks about murdering children. We are going to look back 15-20 years from now and people are going to speak about Hathaway in this role the way people talk about Tim Curry in the role of IT in the ‘1990s.
Now The Witches is so much more than just Anne Hathaway as a once in a generation nightmare creature. Basically the only other character in the film with any considerable screen time is Octavia Spencer in the role of Grandma who takes in a young boy (Jahzir Bruno) after his parents die in a car accident. The film is set in ‘1960s Alabama and the soundtrack is full of all kinds of MoTown classics as we see Grandma trying to get the young boy out of his shell when suddenly, the boy comes in close contact with a witch. Grandma then goes full voodoo witch doctor as she reads crystals and burns sage before taking the boy to a fancy hotel to keep him safe from witches.
Once they arrive at the hotel they find it infested with witches led by Anne Hathaway who have a plan to turn all the children in the world into mice by opening up candy stores across the country and selling chocolate bars laced with Formula 86 which can turn a child into a mouse with just 3 drops. The young boy, who goes unnamed throughout the film, overhears this witchy plot and is sniffed out by the Grand High Witch, because to witches, children smell like dog poo. The witches turn him and his friend into mice and the remainder of the movie is CGI mice running through a fancy hotel trying to turn themselves back into human form and combat the witches. In the end they decide it’s not how you look on the outside that’s important, it’s how you feel on the inside that matters most.
The film is directed by Robert Zemeckis, who is well known for Back to the Future and Forrest Gump but is no stranger to horror as he directed the underrated classic What Lies Beneath. It includes some voice over narration by Chris Rock as the boy all grown up, but being honest, all of that is secondary to Anne Hathaway’s freaky face. Without that this is a somewhat standard kid’s movie; some background noise that my girl’s have on TV while I do other stuff, but her performance as the Grand High Witch makes this a horror film that easily will find its way into our family’s annual scary movie watch-a-thon.
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