The Witches (1990)

⭐ 7.5/10

(Originally written by Joseph)

This is one of the weirdest movies I have ever seen in my life. But Roald Dahl is a weird guy, so I guess it all tracks. It's a movie about a boy who one day learns that witches exist, and then right after that finds himself at a hotel that only witches are currently staying at. He walks in on a witch meeting and has to stop their plot of turning all the children to mice.

That sounds like a pretty normal premise for a kids movie but trust me when I say there is nothing normal about this movie. That introduction I just summarized only concludes half way through to start. Then everything that happens after gets very zany, and the characters always have very weird reactions to those zany things. The cgi of the mice is terrible, but also half the time they use real mice. The child actors are terrible, the grandma seems like she's never acted before, and also Mr Bean is in this movie.

I turned to Jess while we watched and said this feels like a movie made by people who have never seen a movie before and are just guessing what one is like. That or it was written by children. It's just very strange.

And yet? I kinda liked it! It was very quirky, very whimsical, and had the kind of dialogue where you know it was a novel first. Dahl is weird, but also I remember all his books very well from 20 years ago, so I know they are also creative and impressionable. So I recommend it, I guess.