Maybe it’s beside the point to have a 30th-anniversary rerelease for Disney’s Halloween witch comedy starring Bette Midler – it’s been on a kind of permanent, low-level rerelease for three decades. The persistent, annual revival on US TV since it bombed on its cinema release in 1993 is supposed to be what’s gradually turned this film into a slow-burn success and then a cult favourite. Watching it again reveals Hocus Pocus to be … well … the pretty good film that it should have been recognised as at the time, a sort of family-friendly Witches of Eastwick.
A cheeky 17th-century prologue sequence in Salem, Massachusetts establishes that – whatever Arthur Miller might claim – witches with evil power were a real thing and the menfolk of the time were entirely justified in hating and fearing them. Three witches, the Sanderson sisters, are hanged in the village square (a weirdly brutal scene, in fact, for all that you see only their dangling legs), having kidnapped a local little girl to imbibe her youth and turned her elder brother into a cat. Flashforward 300 years and the sisters’ tumbledown house is now a disused museum, closed because of the creepy things that kept happening inside. A local teen called Max (Omri Katz) raises the witches from the dead because he busts into the museum and rashly lights the “black candle” there, which legend says will call up the evil women if a virgin sparks it back to life. The Sanderson witches now set about preying on the children of the town – most prominently Max’s kid sister Dani, a nice performance from 11-year-old Thora Birch who was later to have her own adult Hollywood career in films like Sam Mendes’s American Beauty and Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World.
The Sandersons are of course led by Midler as leader Winifred, her teeth horribly transformed into a chipmunk-dental horror within a kissy lipstick pout. Kathy Najimy plays her sister Mary, who is supposedly able to smell out children but the film doesn’t make much of this wicked childcatcher-like superpower. And finally there is Sarah Jessica Parker as the youngest witch, very atypically playing broad comedy, for which Parker was not really suited, but whose 90s celebrity through starring in Sex and the City has surely played its part in boosting this film. Vinessa Shaw is Max’s cool love interest Alison and legendary director Garry Marshall and his equally legendary sister Penny Marshall have cameos as a grouchy couple who have dressed up for Halloween.
This is a sweet-natured film which oddly achieves a moment of Spielbergian intensity for its “farewell” scene at the very end. It is an enjoyable watch and a decent bit of entertainment, although maybe it functions better as a small-screen discovery for its devoted fanbase.
• Hocus Pocus is released on 29 September in UK cinemas.
