The Witches Review: 4 Ups & 6 Downs

Downs...

6. It's Just Not Scary

The most immediate issue with this new adaptation is that it lacks the thick, unsettling mood of both Roeg's previous movie and the source novel.

Zemeckis has instead ironed out the tone and attempted to make a modern riff on the story that's more palatable for young children, in the process stripping away much of its personality.

The insanely creepy Norway-set flashback from the 1990 film has been replaced with a flat alternative, which rather than hauntingly imprison a young girl inside a painting, simply turns her into a giant CGI chicken.

Even once the hotel-set portion of the film kicks off, it's more goofy than scary, focused on relatively harmless gross-out gags, while also stripping away the disconcerting body horror aspects of Roeg's film, with the mouse transformations being almost instantaneous in this version.

The previous film had the bravery to fully commit to its bold ideas, but this take sadly feels largely gutless.