Connery's stylish performance and self-deprecating humor make his return performance as James Bond (after twelve years) a real treat--but the film, a remake of THUNDERBALL, is uneven and overlong. Brandauer is a smooth villain, and Carrera a memorably sexy villainess, Fatima Blush. Panavision.


The Witches

CAST
Anjelica Huston Mrs.
Mai Zetterling
Jasen Fisher
Rowan Atkinson
Bill Paterson
Brenda Blethyn
Charles Potter
Anna Lambton
Jane Horrocks
Sukie Smith
Rose English
Jenny Runacre
Annabel Brooks
Emma Relph
Nora Connolly
Rosamud Greenwood
Anjelique Rockas


REVIEWS

The best children's stories are the scariest ones, because to kids they seem most likely to contain the truth. A lot of stories end with everybody living happily ever after, but they're boring stories unless there seems to be a good chance that unspeakable dangers must be survived on the way to the ending. Roald Dahl's children's stories always seem to know that truth, and the best thing about Nicolas Roeg's film of Dahl's book The Witches is its dark vision--this is not only a movie about kids who are changed into mice, it's a movie where one of the mice gets its tail chopped off.
The film opens on an ominous note in Norway, with Luke (Jasen Fisher) being told stories about witches by his old grandmother (Mai Zetterling). They're real, she says, and they walk among us. But you can spot them if you get a good look at them, because they have square feet. They're also bald and have pointy noses, but the important thing is they're not imaginary. The grandmother has even heard tell of a Grand High Witch, who rules all of the others, and is the most terrible of all.
Tragedy strikes. Luke's parents are killed in a car crash. He travels with his grandmother to England on family business, and they end up in a seaside hotel which is hosting a convention of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. Somehow when you see the head of the society, Miss Ernst (Anjelica Huston), you don't feel good about your chances of having cruelty prevented to you if you're a child.
Huston, whose energy dominates the film, dresses like a vampire vamp with stiletto heels, a tight black dress, a severe hairstyle, and blazing red lipstick. Roeg often photographs her using lenses which make her leer into the camera, and she's always towering over everybody, especially little boys like Luke. Wandering through the labyrinthine hallways of the old hotel, Luke stumbles upon a private meeting one day, and discovers to his horror that the Society is actually a convention of witches--and that
Huston, the fabled Grand High Witch, has plans to turn all of the children in England into mice.
Luke is, of course, discovered while eavesdropping, and becomes the first child forced to drink a secret potion and become a mouse. And it's here that the genius of the late Jim Henson comes into play, as his special effects team creates a world in which gigantic pieces of furniture tower over the little boy-mouse and some of his friends, as they try to survive cats and extermination and save the children of England.
Some of the sequences are predictable from other movies about people who shrink to microscopic size. Others are fresh, including the way Luke is finally able to convince his grandmother he is her grandson and not a mouse. Lucky for him she believes in witches already. The movie turns into a race against time, good against evil, and Roeg doesn't spare his young audiences the sinister implications of the plot.
This is the first so-called children's movie from Nicolas Roeg, that most unorthodox of directors, whose credits include DON'T LOOK NOW, TRACK 29, EUREKA, and INSIGNIFICANCE. He almost always expresses a twisted, sinister sensuality in his films, and in this one that sensibility expresses itself in his willingness to let the child-mice face some of the real dangers of their predicament. The result is that the movie might be too intense for smaller viewers (although some of them these days seem hardened to anything). But THE WITCHES is an intriguing movie, ambitious and inventive, and almost worth seeing just for Anjelica Huston's obvious delight in playing a completely uncompromised villainess.



                                    CONTINUED