Bones' Review for "Return to Oz"
I must admit to having a soft spot for the 1985 Walt Disney sequel "Return to Oz" which prevents me from being completely impartial in my judgment of it. It was the first live action movie I ever saw at the theatre as a child. For reasons of nostalgia I had long tried to find it on video but to no avail. That is because it was simply never released for sale until 2004. I finally did buy the DVD and it brought back a lot of memories; images from my childhood that I had thought were gone but still lingered just below the surface. I did not remember the background, the plot or anything like that but certain images stuck in my mind such as the princess with many heads, the creepy wheelers and of course the new characters around Dorothy Gail with my favorite being the clockwork soldier Tick Tock. The stone hands opening a "door" in the cave also stuck in my mind for some reason. However, my own sentimentality aside, one thing I can certainly and honestly say is that this is NOT the same sort of film as "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz".
Unlike the first film, this one is not a musical, not full of happy little munchkins and unlike its G-rated predecessor is rated PG and deserves it. It is still a film for children of course, with nothing too extreme, but is certainly a much darker Oz than the first film. In the first film Oz is a beautiful and wonderful place with only one really bad character and few really spooky parts to it. In "Return to Oz" nothing is idyllic to start with at all and the movie is full of a lot of darkness and danger that does not seem very "Disney" at all; but of course that makes someone like me like it all the more. Fairuza Balk (who is great in anything) plays Dorothy in her film debut. She is great, though given her future part in "The Craft" one cannot help make the comment that little Dorothy grew up to be a witch! She is younger than Dorothy was in the first movie, but it works well anyway as nothing is the same as it was in the first film, which probably hurt its popularity but should not have if people were reasonable creatures.
The movie is darker to begin with. The family is still recovering from the disastrous tornado, deeply in debt, Uncle Henry is depressed and does no work by milking a broken leg that healed long ago. Aunt Emily is overworked and stressed out and everyone thinks little Dorothy is crazy because she keeps talking about a place called Oz full of witches, talking lions, talking scarecrows and woodsmen made of tin. She has also become an insomniac which worries her family mostly because it interferes with her chores and ability to help out on the struggling farm. Finally she is taken to an insane asylum where she is to undergo electro-shock therapy. Yes, you read that right! It is a far cry from singing "Over the Rainbow" and running away to save her dog from a nasty neighbor. We also find out (not that it matters much to the story) that unlike the first film, the Tin Man was not put together by a kindly tinsmith but hacked himself to pieces with his own axe after a witch put a spell on it and he had to replace his entire body with tin one part at a time. The film also introduces real life characters that we will see in Oz later just as in the first movie, which I like. Put your fears at ease though, little Dorothy does not get the bug zapper.
Dorothy is delivered from her house of horrors during a torrential thunder storm by a mysterious little girl we will see later. She falls into a raging river, grabs a chicken coop to stay afloat and after passing out wakes up in the land of Oz. Since Toto had to stay behind her only companion is her chicken Bellina (though we are never told how or why) who can now talk and who is actually quite funny I thought with some of her little comments. Oz is, again, quite different from the outset. They first appear in the Deadly Desert which turns anything that touches it to sand. They later discover that the Munchkin city is gone, replaced by nothing but an overgrown forest. The famous yellow brick rode is a broken, scattered, string of yellow fragments and when Dorothy and Bellina reach the Emerald City they find nothing but a gutted ruin filled with stone statues and rubble as well as some graffiti on a wall warning them to beware of the wheelers. To her horror Dorothy discovers the Tin Man and the Cowardly Lion to now be stone statues as well.
The wheelers then make their first appearance, appropriately named because these creepy creatures have wheels in the place of hands and feet. They chase Dorothy into a secret room where she meets Tick Tock, aka the Army of Oz. She finds out that the Scarecrow (the King of Oz) is missing and every living thing has been turned to stone. Tick Tock saves Dorothy from the wheelers and forces one of them to tell the pair that it was the Nome king who conquered the Emerald City and that only Princess Mombi knows where the scarecrow is. They then go to visit Princess Mombi who is actually a woman with 32 heads. She keeps then in glass cases in a large gallery and intends to lock Dorothy up until she is old enough to harvest her head as well. Tick Tock (who needs periodic winding to think, speak and move) winds down and cannot save our heroine. While locked in the tower Dorothy meets Jack Pumpkinhead.
Jack is simply a collection of sticks tied together in the shape of a tall, lanky man with a jack-o-lantern for a head. He explains that his mom made him to scare Princess Mombi, which he did, but Mombi then used her powder of life on him to see if it really worked and then locked him in the tower. Dorothy comes up with a plan to use that powder of life to escape and journey to the mountain of the Nome king where Princess Mombi said the Scarecrow was being held prisoner. Using Jack with his long, wooden arm to unlock the door, Dorothy slips out and winds up Tick Tock who goes with Jack to put together an escape vehicle while Dorothy goes to steal the powder of life from Mombi. Dorothy succeeds but the gallery of shrieking heads wakes the headless Mombi who pursues Dorothy back to the tower. She finds things there in a state of chaos since Tick Tock has gone berserk thanks to his brain winding down. Dorothy winds him up and shakes the powder of life over the contraption he and Jack assembled; basically a sofa and a love seat tied together with palm leaves for wings, a broom for a tail and topped off by the head of an Oz creature called a Gump.
Dorothy brings the creature to life and the group flies out of the window just in time to escape the enraged Mombi who quickly sends her wheelers after them in a ground pursuit. They escape the wheelers but the jury-rigged Gump falls apart just as they reach the mountain palace of the Nome King. Dorothy learns that the Nome King claims everything from inside the earth as his own and was enraged at the Emerald City being full of his emeralds, so he took them, turned everyone to stone and made the Scarecrow his prisoner. When Dorothy and friends arrive he turns the Scarecrow into an ornament. With Bellina concealed inside Jack, everyone must take a turn touring the ornament room trying to guess which one the scarecrow is. The downside is that after three incorrect guesses the person in question becomes an ornament as well. The Gump goes first and does not return, then Jack goes and meets a similar fate. While Tick Tock is guessing the Nome King reveals that he has the ruby slippers and that he used their powers to conquer the Emerald City and it is also clear that every time someone turns into an ornament the Nome King becomes more and more human.
Dorothy finally, on her last guess, discovers the secret of how to know which ornaments are natives of Oz and this causes the Nome King to regress and become extremely unhappy with the situation. The resulting climax scene, while tame by adult standards, is downright Hellish for a Disney movie with walls crumbling, fires roaring out of an abyss, a giant monster and demonic looking stone gnomes hissing and grapping out at our heroes. Without giving away anything, it is not surprising that Dorothy, the Gump, Jack, Tick Tock and the Scarecrow escape and see Oz and the Emerald City restored to their former glory. The identity of Jack's mother is revealed and the full story of what transpired in Oz between the visits of Dorothy is revealed and our little heroine goes back to Kansas. The asylum staff was taken into custody, other than the doctor who died in the storm, and everything ends on a happy note.
As I said, I am most certainly biased, but I love this movie. The special effects were pretty good, I think, for 1985 and I maintain are still better than a great deal of what is put out today. Who can feel any real attachment to CGI characters? Whether it be Tick Tock, Jack Pumpkinhead or even the Gump you find it easier to become emotionally involved with them. I think anyone could feel the emotion, genuinely, when Tick Tock is about to make his final guess in the ornament room and drops of oil seep from the corner of his eye as Dorothy gives him a last hug. The supporting cast all does a good job in my opinion and little Fairuza Balk is outstanding as Dorothy and in all the years since I have seen her play a wide array of different kinds of parts (usually out of the ordinary) and she is always brilliantly convincing. The only reason I can come to for this movie not doing any better than it did was the hesitancy of fans of the first film to embrace one that was so different. Well, I loved the first film, I think it was the first live-action movie I ever got on video (and I watched it over and over again as my parents can attest) and I loved this one as well, both at the time and more than two decades later. I may be biased, and being a little creepy and twisted myself might have something to do with it, but I can "Return to Oz" a heartfelt thumbs up.