Witches Brew

The Witches (1990) is on our queue because I thought Anjelica Huston was going to be in Death Becomes Her. When I realized what the confusion was, I queued this up. This is a completely different movie.

Directed by Nicholas Rong, it is based on a novel by Roald Dahl. It is about a boy, Jasen Fisher, who goes to live with his grandmother (Mai Zetterling) when his parents die (told you it was Roald Dahl). She’s a lovely old lady who tells him stories about witches, how they long to kill all children, how they are monsters under their human masks and how children smell like dog droppings to them.

When she falls ill, they go to a Cornwall hotel to recover. The hotel is run by Rowan Atkinson, doing a combination Mr. Bean and Basil Fawlty. Young Jasen meets a chubby boy raiding the pastries and makes friends. But then he discovers that Anjelica Huston is chairing a meeting of all the witches in the world at that very hotel. They plan to use a potion to turn all the children into mice - and they start  with Jasen’s chubby friend.

Most of the fun in the movie is in the Dahlian silliness, and also the Jim Henson mouse puppets and witch makeup. Huston’s gloriously evil witch is great, of course, but sadly doesn’t get the screen time she deserves. All in all, I suspect I would have loved this if I’d seen it as a child, but of course, I was in my 30s when it came out. So I can only say I enjoyed it.