For certain millennials of a certain age (myself, perhaps, included), there’s something fittingly ritualistic about the consumption of 1993 witchcraft comedy Hocus Pocus, a film set, and set to be watched, on Halloween. It’s as tied to the day as bobbing for apples and being scared of teenagers, the kind of lived-in practice that happens without thinking about it, leading to huge, unquestioning pockets of affection, less for what it contains and more for what it represents. In situations like this, when nostalgia can overwhelm objectivity, the prospect of adding to the story is inherently fraught, any excitement over the new tempered by adulation for the old.
So like many fan favourite follow-ups, Hocus Pocus 2 is stuck, trapped somewhere between different times, audiences and tones, trying to do so much yet, in this instance, achieving so very little. It’s structurally more akin to a remake, one that aims to appease older diehards while being accessible to newcomers, a not impossible task (recent rehauls of Chip n Dale and Scream managed to do this well enough) but one it struggles with throughout, broomstick barely hovering off the ground. At times it feels more like an extended, if joke-free, SNL skit than a real movie, giving us the iconography we want but without any of the soul, propulsion or bare necessity we need to go with it, something that exists because it could rather than should.
