Those of us who came of age in the early 90s will remember with sweet nostalgic fondness the annual ritual of watching "Hocus Pocus"on the Disney Channel every Halloween. But well beyond the sentimental recollections of our childhood, "Hocus Pocus" is actually a very fine movie: It's funny, clever, well-cast, well-appointed, and presents a surprisingly rich emotional and moral storyline that greatly exceeds the campy popular impressions that surround it. It is, in short, a really good film.
[Warning: Spoilers ahead]
You cannot say the same for "Hocus Pocus 2," out this week on Disney Plus. This is a genuinely bad movie from start to finish, a nearly perfect example of a present-day Disney media endeavor: It is shallow, low-stakes, boring, unfunny, aimless, utterly crammed with uninspired, bland, corporate CGI. It's a film made up of one part nostalgia bait to five parts girl power with a considerable amount of LGBT pandering thrown in just to hold off the Twitter mobs. It's a really awful film. Don't watch it.
If you recall, the first film featured the evil trio of the Sanderson Sisters, resurrected on Halloween and hell-bent on seeking out little children in order to consume their souls. The movie's plot was built entirely around the efforts of the protagonists to stop the witches from doing this awful thing. It was a simple, tight, focused storyline, and it was told well, with a near-perfect utilization of Freytag's Pyramid.
The sequel, on the other hand, can barely remain focused on a single plotline for four minutes. The Sanderson Sisters are resurrected again and they want to steal children's souls! Okay, the protagonists are going to stop them from doing that! Wait, now the sisters want to become the most powerful witches in the world and take their revenge on the town of Salem, or something! Okay! Wait, now they want to kill the mayor because he's descended from the goodman that terrorized the girls during colonial times! Wait, now they want his daughter! Wait, now the main protagonist is a witch! Wait, now all three of the protagonists are witches! Wait, now the Sanderson sisters are kind of good, or something like that! Now they're gone! Wait, they could still come back some day!
It's all profoundly exhausting, and the sum total effect is that you can't figure out what movie you're watching and moreover you don't even care. The Sanderson Sisters, who were once the perfect embodiments of comical yet horrifying child-eating evil, have been reduced to meaningless cartoonish pastiches, wandering around and squawking at people and acting bemused at modern technology, all as a substitute for actually taking meaningful part in the plot. The protagonists — who are they? You know nothing about them at the start of the film and nothing by the end of it. They are the archetypal Zoomer teenagers, spending most of the film scrunching their faces up in ironic faux-disbelief, deadpanning their lines instead of actually acting, and using the word "literally" about once every four minutes.
Of course, it would not be a modern Disney film without serious genuflections toward social-justice wokeism. The movie contains at least half a dozen gay characters, which percentage-wise is rather more than you might find at even the average Bette Midler concert (notably, four of these male characters are dressed in women's clothing). At one point, in some of the clumsiest movie dialogue I have ever personally witnessed, a young woman has to explain to a young man that "pointing out people's differences and saying that they're weird is making fun of them." A film franchise once driven by witches consuming the souls of little children has been reduced to ham-fisted, awkward lessons about why bullying is bad.
Of course, the girlboss element has to be crammed into the mix somehow, so the film ends with the three young lady protagonists assuming the role of witches, complete with Winnifred Sanderson's spell book — a book, mind you, that in the Hocus Pocus canon was written by Satan. Disney is apparently more than content with satanic worship so long as people will say "Yas, Queen!" about it on social media.
One of the principle problems with modern filmmaking is that filmmakers have seemingly lost the ability to tell a story that exceeds the sum of its parts. A good story utilizes every sequence in order to either move the narrative forward or deepen what has already been revealed. That very simple and easy convention has largely been abandoned in most films today, and most glaringly in "Hocus Pocus 2." Things happen in this movie without meaning or purpose. The witches put a spell on a small crowd of Salem residents to help them find the mayor; they hunt and stalk the mayor through the town streets, eventually finding him, but nothing matters, nothing comes of it. The mayor himself is obsessed with getting a candy apple at a town fair; eventually he gets it, but then he loses it, but it doesn't matter, nothing comes of it. A goofy boyfriend character sort of loiters on the edges of the action, it seems like he's going to be some sort of significant player at some point in the movie; nope, he's not, he's gone, he's unimportant. The entire film has the feeling of a series of vignettes that were started and never finished.
Would that "Hocus Pocus 2" remained unfinished, or better yet that it was never started. This is a bad movie that is not worth your time. If you want a fun, well-done Halloween movie for you and your children this October, watch the original — and better yet, buy it used on DVD instead of watching it on Disney Plus. This company no longer deserves your money.
