Hocus Pocus keeps super-cool with all its clueless parents and talking cats and devil worship. It allows its children to use obscene language like, "This town sucks!" and probably uses the word virgin more times than any other Disney movie, but I'm not positive about that. That's right, it goes the full PG! And yes, the fact that the main character is a virgin is the movie's top joke, as if there were nothing more hilariously absurd than a sexually-inexperienced 14-year-old.
We open on a quiet, typical Salem home in the late 1600s. Too quiet! A young man realizes that his younger sister is not around, so he looks outside and, sure enough, she's wandering very slowly into the woods where everybody knows three witches reside. He's all like, "Hey! Where ya goin?!" and she's all like, "..." So something's definitely up.
The girl shows up at the house of the three Sanderson sisters who are witches and are really busy throwing together a brew that will allow them to suck the life out of whatever child that drinks it. Their preparations are mania itself, full of panicked running around the house grabbing dead man's toes and shrill shrieking. Let me mention that this is the comedy high point of the picture and it's not at all funny.
The three witches are played by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy. Midler is the most entertaining to watch, but only because she's in full-throttle crazy loon mode, and never for a second lets up, even when we scream at the screen, "Stop cackling!" Najimy spends most of the movie murmuring incomprehensibly and then hiccupping, "Sorry! Sorry! I'm sorry!" This is supposed to be funny? wacky? endearing? And Parker is bubbly/bouncy/bonkers, always wanting to "play with" young boys, skank that she is.
Anyway, they suck the life out of the young girl and magically transform from hideous old hags to hideous younger hags. The brother (who just showed up even though he was running) witnesses this and is caught by the sisters who declare that he must be severely punished, rather than killed. This makes no sense because the reason the boy needs to be punished is vague and the witches are lenient with absolutely nobody else, but whatever, they turn him into a cat that can live forever and now there's a talking cat in the movie.
At this exact moment, an angry mob shows up at the house to arrest the witches, as is movie law. The sisters get their necks in nooses, but aren't frightened because a magic book that Midler has told her that a young VIRGIN would resurrect them someday, so no worries. Then they are hanged onscreen and the boy-cat's family grows old and dies and this wacky kid's movie is off to a good start.
Fast-forward 300 years, and we are now in a Salem high school classroom where the teacher is recounting the story of the Sanderson sisters that we literally just watched. At the end of the schoolteacher's little horror story (She's paid for this, remember.), a young man (VIRGIN) announces that he doesn't believe in such poppycock, and for this he is roundly mocked by everyone, including the cute girl in the corner. You see, Salem takes its witch-related past very seriously and apparently talks about nothing else. Even the small children talk about how they learned about the Sanderson sisters in school instead of, you know, real history. Or math.
Taking the mockery as a sign of flirtation, the boy hands the cute girl his phone number on a folded piece of paper. Taking into account his humiliating status as both an unbeliever and a VIRGIN, she all but says, "No thanks," and hands the paper back to him. He eagerly opens the paper, apparently expecting to see her number, and is utterly dismayed to discover that it is his own number! The one he just gave her!
The boy's name is Max and he and his little sister and his stupid parents have just moved to Salem to take advantage of their wild Halloween parties, or at least so it would seem since that's all the parents seem to care about. After having a rough encounter in a graveyard just outside of town (Whut?) with a couple bullies who talk like surfers and use words like 'tubular,' Max goes home, flops on his bed and starts moaning the name Allison (Cute Girl). His little sister then bursts out of his closet, interrupting whatever it was he was about to do in this DISNEY MOVIE FOR KIDS.
While taking his little sister, who's name is Dani (Whut?), trick-or-treating, they run into Allison who is suddenly very kind to Max and is, like, super into witches. So Max thinks it would be really romantic to break into the abandoned museum that was once the home of the Sanderson sisters and light the Black-Flame Candle of Satan that resurrects spirits of dead witches when lit on All-Hallow's Eve by a stupid VIRGIN. Turns out he was wrong.
The Sandersons then burst back into the movie and there's a skirmish that includes Bette Midler shooting lightning out of her fingers, a useful power that she doesn't really use again. Max fools the witches with a lighter and the sprinkler system and he and the girls escape. The witches are fooled by modern-day technology exactly two more times. When they leave the house, they run into a paved road which they think is some sort of scary mud river, so they throw Sarah Jessica Parker into it. She bounces up and down and squeals, "It's firm!" skank that she is. They also mistake Garry Marshall for Satan since he's dressed in a red devil costume and that's totally what the devil really looks like. But this is the guy who made The Other Sister and Valentine's Day, so I'm guessing confusing him with the Prince of Darkness is a pretty common mistake.
The witches' magic brooms are stolen by kids who whisk off into the night sky offscreen and are never mentioned again. Thank you movie for ignoring humor opportunities like that to make room for more weird sex jokes. Did I mention Dani cutely(?) refers to Allison's "yobbos?" And that she says, "Max really likes your yobbos!" And the brooms were only stolen so that the movie could throw in a joke about Najimy trying to fly on a vacuum cleaner.No further criticism needed there.
Anyway, one uneventful bus ride later and the witches suddenly know all about technology and slang terms. This leads to jokes like Midler shrieking, "Do you have your driver's permit?" to Max while he's trying to drive his friend to safety, which is astonishingly illogical AND unfunny! Wow!
Note that most of all this happens in the first half hour, and is set-up for a painfully hour-long chase scene that is the rest of the movie, during which the following events occur:
1. The kids meet the talking cat-boy, who serves no purpose except to "die" every now and again, and jump back to life.
2. Midler brings a deceased boyfriend to life and he stumbles around testing how many times a zombie's head can fall off and still not be funny.
3. The kids sneak into their parent's party to warn them, but the witches distract everyone with an impromptu musical number, as malevolent hell-spawned creatures are prone to do.
4. Discovering that the sisters are grossed out by salt, Allison pours some around herself at one point, causing Parker to squeal, "Aren't you a clever little WHITE witch?" (Whut?)
5. Max tries to tell a policeman about what's going on, while emphasizing that he is, in fact, a VIRGIN. The policeman, like everyone else at Disney in those days, simply cannot believe that children aren't having sex. He drills Max about it, demanding, "Are you really a VIRGIN?!" It turns out he isn't even a cop. That's just his costume, which is totally not illegal!
6. The kids lure the witches into the school incinerator, which is the size of my house, and they come out of the whole situation completely unharmed. So, hang a witch and she dies. Burn a witch alive and she gets smoke in her eyes.
I'm going to stop there, cause if I were to list all the faults of the movie accurately, I would really just need to post the screenplay. I know it's hard to believe, but way more stupid stuff happens in the 93 minutes of Hocus Pocus than even what I've mentioned. Since the movie keeps telling us over and over that the witches will turn to dust at dawn, at the end of the movie the sun comes out and *SPOILER ALERT* the witches turn to dust. I am told that this is one of Disney's most beloved catalogue titles, which boggles the mind, but I urge you to seek other, less nauseating entertainments to enjoy with your little ones this Halloween. Like Twitches Two (I'm just kidding. Please don't do that.).
*****
Are you one of this film's many fans? Embarrass yourself in the comments below or in a personal message to me at beauxmoviemail@gmail.com!
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