– Look, Billina, these ones have lost their heads!
– Now, that’s what I call just plain carelessness.
So… after the young kiddies of the 80s were probably still disturbed by Mr. Dark and the wicked things from his carnival three years earlier, there was no question if Return to Oz, the next colorful big summer blockbuster from Walt Disney Studios, would finally be the antidote so that the parents finally didn’t have to constantly change the soaked-wet bedsheets. Right? Right..??
Hahahahahaha, oOOof…
The Japanese distributors knew exactly what kind of film this was by looking at that poster. I also find it funny that they did their best to obscure the Disney logo to make it look like a pure fantasy horror flick. Not so far from it though…
It’s only gone six months after Dorothy Gale (played by an 11-year-old Fairuza Balk) sang and danced through the mystical and colorful land of Oz together with Scarecrow, Tin Man, The Cowardly Lion and her dog Toto to meet the wonderful wizard. And who would forget such an experience, even though the wizard was as fake as a politician? Not Dorothy. Because the witch was at least real. And that keeps her up at night, to her Aunt and Uncle’s frustration. It’s the beginning of the year 1900, the times is harder than ever and the last thing they wanna hear about is her deluded fairytales talking about scarecrows, witches and flying monkeys.
Her Aunt and Uncle also have some bigger plans for her which they have used all their savings on, and that is to send her to a psychiatric clinic to meet Dr. Worley and his witchy assistant Wilson. Dr. Worley proudly shows off his little monstrosity of an electroshock device, because, as he enthusiastically says: It’s the 20th Century! The age of electricity! Uh-oh… yeah, fuck this boolshit, we know where this is going. It’s time for Aunt Em to grab poor Dorothy, take a U-turn and rather encourage her niece to use her crazy imagination to write a series of fantasy novels, or something.
Dorothy spends the night in a room in the cellar, sitting on a bed with an empty and hopeless stare in the air as the disturbing screams of the other mental patients can be heard in the distance. And yes, this is still a film made for the whole family and not some alternative version of Jacob’s Ladder. Dr. Wilson, the witchy assistant, comes in to get Dorothy tightly strapped on a stretcher as if she was Jack Nicholson after trying to strangle nurse Ratched. Just when Dr. Worley is ready to zap Dorothy’s brain, a thunderstorm hits that causes a blackout. As she gets left alone, strapped in the bed, a mysterious girl pops up, unties her and together they escape. As they get chased by Wilson, they stumble and roll into a river where Dorothy floats into the moonlight in a chicken coop.
And the next day, she wakes up in the land of Oz where the river has transformed into a puddle. Somewhere along the ride she’s gotten herself a new companion; the talking chicken Billina. After some brief open world exploring, she sees that the yellow brick road has been destroyed, and discovers that the entire Emerald City has been turned into an apocalyptic wasteland by the evil wizard Nome King (Nicol Williamson). The people are turned to stone, several of whose heads are missing. Beware the wheelers are tagged on the walls. Who the hell are the wheelers, you ask? They’re freaks on… wheels, who looks like former band members of Siouxsie and the Banshees. Something from your worst childhood nightmares, plain and simple. And we can only imagine, in a banned X-rated version, what they would do to little girls if they actually had hands. Ugh.
Dorothy is soon to be captured by the wicked witch Mombi, who lives in the only remaining tower in Emerald City. And haven’t we already seen her before as the witchy assistant at the clinic, just without the sprayed 80s hair? Hmmm… She’s played by Jean March, by the way, who is probably most known for the evil Queen Bawmorda in Willow three years later. She died earlier this year at age 90. RIP. Mombi also has an impressive collection of heads, where the parents now probably reached the final straw and switched over to Mr. Rogers or CNN. Makes me wonder if the writers of Dexter: New Blood took some inspiration from a certain set-piece here. Then we have the variations of the Nome King and his demons made by a mix of stop-and claymation. Pure 1980s magic at its very finest and just top notch production value. Anyway; Dorothy manages to escape the tower on a flying couch, attached and steered by a moose head called Gump. She, and a couple of new friends, the gangling Jack Pumpkinhead and the round mechanic soldier Tik-Tok (the only good TikTok) flies across the deadly desert to visit the Nome King and break the curse that lies over Em City.
In stark contrast to the cheerful, bright and upbeat vibe of the musical The Wizard of Oz (1939), writer and director Walter Murch wiped the rainbow black in one big stroke to take a much darker and psychotic wild-ride approach to L. Frank Baum’s books (you don’t say) . And so he sure did. But already a week into the shooting, the producers started to sweat, and decided to give Walter Murch the boot. Why? Because Disney. Or maybe they had already snorted all the cocaine. As new producers came into the picture, they cut down the budget and got rid of several set-pieces. So who took over the directing job? Thanks to some powerful Soprano friends in showbiz like Steven Spielberg, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola, the studio got pushed into a corner to hire Walter back again. The rats at Disney did what they could to sabotage the film and the career of the fresh first-time director by having almost no promotion for its theatrical release. And they succeeded as the film flopped and didn’t even earn half of the $28 million budget.
The critics weren’t impressed either by how dark and bleak it was, especially the two clowns Siskel and Ebert, who saw Tik-Tok as a R2-D2 ripoff. But yeah, going into this film completely blind and expecting the musical all over again, well… life’s not always fair. There’s no room for humor here and the somber/melancholic tone is pretty much already set in stone (no pun intended) from the first frame, where we see a depressed Dorothy lying in bed and staring at the starry night as she’s thinking about her friends over the faded rainbow. I also have a very weak spot for the score by David Shire. The closest to humor is through some dry, sarcastic lines from the talking chicken, and from a more adult perspective, The Wheelers, because, well, just look at them. All that said: the doom n’ gloom, the dead seriousness, and the constant underlying menacing tension, that get turned up to 666 by the intimidating echoing voice of the Nome King alone, is what makes this film so damn memorable — and, in the end, to a unique, delightful gateway horror that has aged like a fine green vine (not from Nilbog). Good times.
Director: Walter Murch
Writers: Walter Murch, Gill Dennis
Country & year: USA/UK, 1985
Actors: Fairuza Balk, Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh, Piper Laurie, Matt Clark, Michael Sundin, Tim Rose, Sean Barrett, Mak Wilson, Denise Bryer, Brian Henson, Emma Ridley
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0089908/
