Say what you will about Nicolas Roeg’s 1990 adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches; it knows how to be nightmare fuel. For all the faults in the original source material, Roeg’s version is bold enough to really scare children out of their wits, which isn’t a bad goal for a PG-horror story. Unfortunately, kids will likely find themselves bored and listless with Robert Zemeckis’ new adaptation of The Witches. While it still follows the same basic plot beats, Zemeckis misses every opportunity to be interesting with his story, instead opting for the adventures of CGI mice and Anne Hathaway hamming it up with an Eastern European accent. The Witches is the kind of kids’ movie that talks down to its audience by being cartoony and broad without ever really getting on their level.

In December 1968, a young boy (Jahzir Bruno) goes to live with his grandma (Octavia Spencer) in Alabama after his parents die in a car accident. One day, the boy comes across a real witch, and his grandmother confirms from her own experiences that witches are real. They’re demons who masquerade as women by wearing wigs, long gloves to cover up their claws, makeup to mask their monstrous jaws; and they don’t have toes. They also hate children and long to squish them. Trying to get off the scent of a witch in their small town, the young boy and his grandmother head to a fancy hotel in Alabama only to encounter the Grand High Witch (Hathaway) and a coven of other witches, who have a plan to turn children the world over into mice. The young boy gets discovered and turned, but resolves, with the help of two other children who are now mice, to stop the witches from enacting their nefarious plot.

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Image via Warner Bros / HBO Max

Despite Zemeckis working from a script he wrote with Kenya Barris and where even Guillermo del Toro has a co-writing and producer credit, the new version of The Witches is shockingly flat and dull. There’s very little danger here or even Dahl’s twisted spark of inspiration. Zemeckis’ career has been marked by taking chances and making big swings even when those swings fail to connect. The most shocking thing about The Witches is how timid and bland it all is. This is easily one of Zemeckis’ most anonymous features, and if not for the heavy reliance on the CGI rodents, you’d never even have a hint that he was involved with this adaptation. I’ll take a massive blunder like Welcome to Marwen any day over this because at least that’s a fascinating failure.

The reliance on CGI lessens the impact of the scares because whereas Roeg had to rely on makeup, Zemeckis just goes with CGI, and then leans into the cartoonish aspects. It’s a choice, but one that doesn’t serve his movie particularly well. Zemeckis hasn’t hesitated in the past to scare children (I remember a lot of walkouts when I saw his adaptation of A Christmas Carol), but here he seems more inclined to send them on an adventure. The problem is that the adventure doesn’t have much of a spark to it beyond the mice getting into mischief. I suppose there’s something empowering about children, who are now even smaller because their mice, overpowering the evil witches, but that empowerment rarely comes through since the witches never seem that fearsome, and the kids aren’t all that interesting.

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Image via Warner Bros / HBO Max

The new adaptation occasionally grazes up against something interesting like putting black characters at the forefront of the story and setting the story in 1960s Alabama, but then it doesn’t really do anything with the framing. It’s not overtly a story about racial power dynamics (a white kid also gets turned into a mouse), and the witches themselves seem more rooted in the Stranger Danger moral panic than America’s racial conflict of the 1960s or even today. It’s fine to cast Spencer and Bruno as heroic characters, but if you’re going to reset the action to 1960s Alabama, it feels like a missed opportunity when they face no obstacles other than witches who hate all children equally.

Even as a piece of content that will be included on HBO Max’s streaming platform, The Witches never makes the case as to why it’s worth any viewer’s time. Kids have no shortage of adventure stories, and they also have no shortage of good Roald Dahl adaptations. Perhaps the biggest knock against The Witches is that it simply lacks the wonder of stories like James and the Giant Peach, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and The BFG. Those stories have their dark elements as well, but they also serve to transport their audience in delightful and imaginative ways. The Witches is about mice in a hotel, and Zemeckis never really figures out how to do more with it than that.

Rating: D

The Witches arrives on HBO Max on October 22nd.

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