Hocus Pocus Review
Children (though not young children) who find the humor of the Three Stooges just a wee bit too subtle may enjoy Hocus Pocus, but it's hard to imagine anyone else standing for this annoying piece of hokum. Putting criticism aside for a moment -- which in this case is pretty hard to do -- it's hard to imagine just who the folks at Touchstone/Disney aimed this piece of claptrap at. It's too disturbing for very young children, too obnoxious for adults and too dull for anyone in between. There's plenty of blame to go around, but let's start with the quartet of screenwriters, who took what should have been a workable high concept and destroyed it with a story which is totally unfocused (and makes no sense), dialogue that evokes physical pain in the listener, and characters that are both one dimensional and unlikable. At times, the story telling is so inept that it almost seems as if the screenplay was fashioned by having one writer "create" until he got tired, then having another writer take it from there -- but without letting him read what had come before. Almost as bad as the writing is Kenny Ortega's amazingly poor direction. Ortega seems to think that the way to cover up flaws in the writing is to play a scene as loudly as possible. If volume alone doesn't get the desired result, he adds in as much flailing as possible. As a result, Bette Midler is encouraged to offer a performance so excessive as to become genuinely vulgar -- and boring, to boot. Kathy Najimy is given one note to play and plays it incessantly, and Omri Katz is actively annoying. Sarah Jessica Parker comes off best of the leading players, managing against all odds to inject a few moments of interest and humor into the film. But the only actors to actually score big are Garry and Penny Marshall, whose little cameo is the high point of the film. Some of the special effects are good, some are not. The "I Put a Spell on You" sequence, however, was ill advised. Hocus is a fright, alright, but not the kind it intended to be. Craig Butler, Rovi
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