[5.8/10] I don’t like to play the “Who is this for?” card. It can stack the deck against films that do something unique or otherwise out of the ordinary. There’s room for films that don’t fit into traditional boxes, even if the specific audience they’re after isn’t immediately clear.

But after watching *The Witches*, a film that made enough of an impression on a certain generation to become a Halloween cult classic, I can’t help wondering, well, why?

Because this movie seems weirdly intense and vaguely-boundary pushing for something meant only for little kids. The sequences where the witches transform into their normal guise is legitimately frightening. There’s legitimate pathos in the untimely death of the protagonist’s parents. The Grand High Witch’s routine is weirdly (if mesmerizingly) sexual much of the time. The heavy hints that the hotel manager is schtupping one of the maids, and young Bruno’s mom is angry at his dad for flirting with Eva Ernst seem odd and miscalibrated for a family film, and not in a clever, slipping it under the radar sort of way. There’s so many things here which seem targeted at an older audience, or at least meant for teenagers.

And yet, this whole movie is too dumb and cheesy to appeal to anyone over the age of nine. Luke, our pint-sized protagonist, is just insufferable. The wacky slapstick sequences of mice running around the hotel could only please someone who remembers what it’s like to be in diapers. The over-the-top acting and constant shrieks and mugging and other mishegoss reflect the kind of broad comedy meant to appeal to underdeveloped minds.

So *The Witches* plays like a cinematic contradiction: a dopey festival of the idiotic to plop a glassy-eyed moppet in front of for an hour or so, while also having the sort of scares and sexual content that would be bizarre to include in a film for that set. Clearly people still enjoy this movie, and have fond memories from when they were a kid, so I’m missing something, but it’s hard to imagine what.

Maybe it’s just Angelica Huston as the queen bee of the vampiric set. She is electric in the role. Huston is one of the few performers in the movie who understands the assignment. She chews the scenery, sure. But she’s also arch, magnetic, and one of the few people in *The Witches* who seems to be having a good time. Her biting retorts to praise or questioning by her flock, her sly annoyed dismissals of humans who get in her way, and her cackling malevolence when unveiling her plans all give her a memorable distinctiveness that would justify any young viewer’s fond remembrances.

In the same way, the prosthetics and other depictions of monstrous transformation here are the only other elements worth the price of admission. Again, the look of the Grand High Witch is grotesque, but in a fantastic way. The bulging nose, the gnarled skin, the overextended fingers and claws all send shivers down your spine. It’s a fantastic melding with Huston’s (or her stand-in’s) great physical performance, as the combination of her preening movements and the horrid exterior create something memorable.

But all the special effects in the film’s transformative sequences catch the eye. Belches of green smoke, half-mice people squirming and gnawing at their plates, even some budding CGI showing a kid in an interstitial state reveal the creativity and inventiveness that remained in Jim Henson Productions. Even where the story and tone fall apart, as a technical showcase and visual marvel, *The Witches* leaves its mark.

Good lord, though, at some point I realized I was rooting for the witches. Luke is *so damn annoying*. He says the word “grandma” roughly fifty times in the movie, with the exact same intonations. His line-reads are abominable, which is an indictment of the director who worked with the young talent, not the kid himself.

But more to the point, there’s never much of a reason to root for Luke. Sure, he loses his parents early in the film, but he never seems affected by it in any way whatsoever, so you sympathize more with his grandmother than him. He doesn’t do anything of note before his mouse transformation, just being whisked around by his grandma and occasionally finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. And even when he tries to play the hero rodentia, the plans are so random and cartoony that, despite the fate of children throughout England being theoretically at stake, it never feels like there’s much in the way of tension, excitement, or courage. Luke’s just the same happy go lucky kid whether he’s just learned his parents or dead or he thinks he’s going to be trapped as a mouse for the rest of his life.

All that’s left otherwise is the various misadventures of the visitors at the hotel. Rowan Atkinson is a generic overwhelmed manager, half-antagonist, half-comic foil, with barely a laugh to be had. Grandma tells the spookiest story in the whole movie in the first ten minutes, but spends most of the rest of the picture aimlessly tossing her grandson into danger and trying futilely to convince some acquaintances that their son has turned into a mouse. The other side kicks and pratfallers and cardboard cut-out characters are all too over-the-top to be worth a damn.

Too much of this is just dumb, in a way that might work if you’re still in elementary school, but which provokes eyerolls for anyone old enough to do multiplication. Which again begs the question, why throw in all this strangely adult stuff if that’s the tone and style of your film?

But maybe that’s the answer. Maybe if you excised Angelica Huston’s brilliant, vibratory performance and the creepshow achievements of the effects team, you’d be left with a forgettable wacky jaunt for babies. And yet those arguably inappropriate elements give *The Witches* a certain sense of danger, something weirder and more memorable than the average kids film for their out-of-place inclusion. I’m still not sure who this movie is for, but maybe it’s meant to be shown to those tykes young enough to appreciate its, shall we say, simple presentation, but still able to be freaked out, confused, or provoked by the film’s more...avant garde elements.