Two Cents is an original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team will program films and contribute our best, most insightful, or most creative thoughts on each film using a maximum of 200 words each. Guest writers and fan comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future entries to the column. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion.
The Pick
The 1939 Wizard of Oz was not the first film version of the L. Frank Baum book series. And ever since that film became enshrined as a cultural classic, a steady stream of artists across all mediums have taken their turn doing a riff on both the ’39 movie and the series as a whole.
There have been prequels that launched their own media franchise. There have books retelling the story from just about every conceivable perspective. Countless sitcoms and cartoons have done their own Wizard of Oz episode with familiar characters slotted into character types from the film. There have been a version done as a sci-fi epic, and a version done as a Game of Thrones-style grim fantasy, and a version done with Muppets in the worst Muppet movie ever.
But one approach we don’t see especially often is the direct sequel, continuing Dorothy’s adventures over the rainbow in direct continuity with the ’39 film.
Walter Murch would be the first to tell you that his 1985 film Return to Oz is not really a sequel to the MGM musical, but a direct adaptation of the Baum books. Audiences (Fairuza) balked at Oz’s truly nightmarish imagery and its parade of grotesque magical creatures, but almost every one of them is pulled directly from the text. Murch, one of the greatest editors in film history making his lone directorial effort, stripped Oz of all the musical film’s affectations to get to the core of Baum’s actual vision, and audiences in droves said, “Thanks but no thanks.”
Return to Oz stars Fairuza Balk as young Dorothy Gale, still preoccupied with thoughts of Oz six months after the fateful twister. When Auntie Em (Piper Laurie) takes her to a facility to receive electroshock therapy, Dorothy promptly escapes and soon finds herself back in the wonderful land of Oz. Only, much of the wonder has gone out of the place. The Emerald City and the Yellow Brick Road lie in ruins, Dorothy’s friends have either vanished or been turned to stone, and the land is overrun by the evil forces of the witch Mombi (Jean Marsh) and the living-stone Nome King (Nicol Williamson). Dorothy forms a new group of friends including living not-the-usual-scarecrow scarecrow Jack Pumpkinhead, the not-tin automaton Tik-Tok, the cowardly talking chicken Belinda, and the animated severed head of a moose like creature known as the Gump, and together they seek to restore Oz back to life.
In part because of the everything I just wrote, and in part because of studio shenanigans, Return to Oz disappeared rapidly from theaters but lives on in the nightmares of a generation of children who sat down presumably expecting a light-hearted adventure in the vein of the classic film, and instead were immersed in a grim fairy tale featuring beloved characters turned to stone, the Wheelers, hallways lined with screaming severed heads, and a seemingly bottomless reserve of mutants and freaks. And those are the good guys!
Next Week’s Pick
For awards season we’re once again selecting some of our favorite overlooked and lesser appreciated films from the last year, “For Your Consideration”. Here are the picks and deadlines:
- Feb 7 — One Cut of the Dead (Shudder)
- Feb 14 — Fast Color (Amazon Prime)
- Feb 21 — I Lost My Body (Netflix)
- Feb 28 — Sweetheart (Netflix)
Would you like to be a guest in the next’s Two Cents column? Simply watch and send your under-200-word review to twocents(at)cinapse.co anytime before midnight on Thursday!
Our Guests
Wow. I had never watched Return to Oz before, but now that I have I wish I had watched it when I was younger. This is purely because I feel like it would have been one of my favorite horror films.
I joke, but Return to Oz is a film that feels like someone watched Wizard of Oz on drugs and then had a never-ending nightmare that they recreated in feature film form. There is nightmare imagery around every corner.
It’s fascinating to watch, but it’s such an assault on the senses that it all kind of blends together. It’s all just one terrifying blob of nightmare character design. Scarecrow is burned into my memory and could very well show up in my own nightmare.
The other big thing about Return to Oz is that it’s paced so slowly. It’s hard to get a sense of where the movie is going or where you are in the movie. Toward the end it still felt like there was an hour to go, which is the same feeling it has at the beginning. Also, I fell asleep twice. (@hsumra)
The Team
It’s not like Return to Oz is the way that it is by accident. When the film’s finale finally returns the Emerald City to its Technicolor glory and actually tries to recreate the vibe and visuals of the original film, it does a perfectly solid job. As a meta-textual reflection on how the hallucinogenic fun of the counter-culture curdled into dystopian bleakness and consumerist obsessions, Return to Oz is indeed a fascinating companion piece to the original.
But as a film, it is so monotonous in its onslaught of sourness that very little of its imagery registers. The whole thing looks literally like shit, with a brown pallor that does a little too good of a job selling the misery and ruin of both Kansas and this new version of Oz.
Ultimately, I don’t think Murch even has a strong grasp on what he wants Oz to be. The movie seems to treat it as an actual place rather than just a dreamland, but Murch pulls the same casting trick as the ’39 movie, and is even more explicit in making the events of Oz line up with things in Dorothy’s real world. If Oz is indeed just a delusion, then the ending of this film suggests that the best way forward for the mentally ill is to keep that a secret.
The pieces are there for a grand reevaluation/continuation of Oz, but Murch either couldn’t or wasn’t allowed to fully realize that vision. Still, this is a fascinating, extraordinarily upsetting attempt.(@TheTrueBrendanF)
As a sequel to the classic MGM film, Return to Oz is wildly unsuccessful. Dorothy de-ages by a solid decade plus and it’s a vastly different film in both tone and scope. However — dare I say — it’s far more my kind of film than that the Judy Garland Technicolor classic.
Quirky characters, weird decisions, and a dark streak that rivals any of the other bizarrely bleak so-called “children’s films” of the 80s, this is everything I want in a family friendly genre film. Young Fairuza Balk is fantastic at the helm and her weird crew of friends is as entertaining as any other friend group at the core of a fantasy tale that I’ve ever seen.
I watched this once before and am so happy to have been reminded to watch it again, as it is now to become something I watch with the family regularly. Perhaps, as a double feature with the likes of The Neverending Story. This is what Disney Plus was created for! (@thepaintedman)
Unfortunately I didn’t realize Return to Oz was this week’s selection in time for a re-watch, so I haven’t seen this since I was a kid in the ’80s. But even 35 years later I still remember how disturbing this movie was. The clowns with the rolly hands and feet are pure nightmare fuel that I remember to this day. Plus this movie stars everyone’s favorite future witch Fairuza Balk. So yes, I highly recommend traumatizing your kids with this cult classic at your earliest convenience. (@salsalissentio)
This is certainly an odd one.This is my first full watch, but I caught it on TV once as a kid, starting right around the most horrific scene where Mombi’s head wakes up and surprises Dorothy, followed by her headless, enraged body. Good times.
I’ve wanted to rewatch it since but never got around to it. The movie is perhaps even weirder than I remembered. It lacks the scope of 1939’s Wizard but is just as imaginative and strange, and I personally like the more sinister edge to Oz — but not so much spilling over into Kansas, where the real-world ugliness betrays the central tenet of “there’s no place like home”.
I do like the odd new troupe of characters, and my favorite part of the movie is the the Nome King and his minions — these are a particularly great effect, incorporating some awesomely quirky stop motion animation.
I’m a fan of Baum’s novel The Marvelous Land of Oz on which this film is loosely based, and do recommend checking that out. (I also have a pet theory that Jack Pumpkinhead was written as an analogy of the Jim Crow era American Negro — try it with that reading). (@Austin Vashaw)
