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| Images courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures |
L. Frank Baum’s The Oz Books series consisting of The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, Ozma of Oz
and many others, were the genesis behind what became an extensive overarching
multimedia experience starting with a 1902 Broadway stage production as well as
a beloved 1939 MGM black-and-white/color phantasmagoria The Wizard of Oz. Centered around a Kansas farm girl named Dorothy
(played by Judy Garland in the film), she finds herself waking up in the mythic
Land of Oz after a tornado has swept her and her little dog Toto away from
home. Forming a group of fantastical
friends including a Scarecrow, a Tin Man and a cowardly Lion, she sets out to
defeat the nefarious Wicked Witch of the West in exchange for her safe return
back home to Kansas. Both the books and
the film were blockbuster trendsetting successes which paved the way for numerous
iterations either loosely or directly based on the texts such as The Wiz,
Zardoz, Wild at Heart and more recently Oz the Great and
Powerful and Wicked.
One which doesn’t get brought up often in the conversation
regarding Oz lore is Academy Award winning film editor and sound
designer Walter Murch’s 1985 dark fantasy sequel hybrid Return to Oz, a
plainly terrifying horror film made for kids whose theatrical release poster of
Dorothy flying happily with her old and new friends in a half-couch, half-deer
head creature sneakily hides the bleak horrors contained therein. Originally beginning with Walt Disney’s
purchase of the rights to the subsequent L. Frank Baum books in 1954 before the
proposed The Rainbow Road to Oz never came to fruition, the film came up
again in 1980 when Walter Murch who just won the Best Sound Academy Award for Apocalypse
Now suggested to Disney they try again.
With the rights to Baum’s books set to lapse, the project was greenlit
at a budget of $28 million with screenwriters’ Murch and Gill Dennis forming an
amalgamation of Baum’s sequel books The Marvelous Land of Oz and Ozma
of Oz into one cohesive film now entitled Return to Oz. A chunk of the budget going to pay off MGM
for rights to use the 1939 ruby slippers and subsequent managerial changes
within the Disney company compounded with falling behind on schedule briefly
terminated Murch from production.
Debatably the poster child of the Walt Disney Company’s
short-lived Dark Era which saw The Black Cauldron earn the first PG
rating for a Disney animated feature as well as The Black Hole which
predated the horrors of Event Horizon by decades, Return to Oz follows
Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk from The Worst Witch and The Craft in
her screen debut) suffering from insomnia constantly talking about the fabled
Emerald City. Thinking she might be crazy,
Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) hastily decide to take her to see Dr. Worley (Nicol
Williamson) and his assistant Nurse Wilson (Jean Marsh) to administer electroshock
therapy to the little girl. On a dark
and stormy night however, lightning knocks the power out and another mysterious
little girl sets Dorothy free where she floats away on a chicken coop.
Reawakening in Oz with her now-talking chicken
Billina, she finds the yellow brick road and Emerald City in a dilapidated
dystopian state with all the civilians and her subset of friends from The
Wizard of Oz have been turned to stone while Mad Max-like ‘wheelers’
with wheels for hands and feet roam the ruins.
Narrowly escaping their grasp, she is rescued by a wind-up mechanical robot
named Tik-Tok (voiced by Sean Barrett) and discovers upon visiting Princess
Mombi (Jean Marsh again) in her castle a collection of wearable heads which she
changes out depending on her mood.
Learning Mombi is in collusion with the Nome King (Nicol Williamson
again), a shape-shifting rock monster, she finds another friend named Jack Pumpkinhead
(Brian Henson as a progenitor to Jack Skellington ala The Nightmare Before
Christmas) and her ragtag group of new fantastical friends find themselves
battling the nefarious Nome King for the survival of Oz.
Featuring moody and grim yet painterly cinematography by The
Devils cameraman David Watkin with uncredited camerawork by The Elephant
Man cinematographer Freddie Francis and a downright terrifying yet
occasionally rousing score by The Conversation and 2010 composer
David Shire, Return to Oz while featuring some of the wonderment
engendered in the 1939 film is a mean and mad horror film aimed at kids. Following the books much more closely than
the 1939 film however, including integrating numerous characters, tropes and
worldbuilding from both of the sequel books, it does however feel like a stern
rejection of anything and everything implied by the MGM classic. With key animation sequences by The
California Raisins stop-motion animator Will Vinton, lush if not oppressive
sets by The Empire Strikes Back production designer Norman Reynolds, the
world of Return to Oz is fully realized with Jim Henson creature effects
animatronics and puppeteering bringing many of the characters to life including
a talking chicken.
Where the film shines are the performances by the three main
leads Fairuza Balk, Jean Marsh and Nicol Williamson. Piper Laurie is a veteran who needs no
introduction and she has the night off in this, but Fairuza Balk in her screen
debut would embark on a most labyrinthine and unexpected career path. With her bright innocent eyes, small figure
and dark black hair, this Dorothy Gale looks every bit as ready to do battle
with unknown waking nightmare horrors as Linda Blair. An early reimagining of Dorothy as a child
scream queen who would later star in The Worst Witch before reframing
her image from innocent girl to angry rebellious goth punk chick in The
Craft and later American History X, Fairuza Balk completely flipped
the switch on her rise from child star to accomplished actress. Jean Marsh of Cleopatra, Frenzy and
The Changeling is no stranger to horror and makes Mombi/Nurse Wilson in
this a truly frightening demoness whose angry eyes and severed head in one key
scene will make you jump out of your skin.
And of course there’s Nicol Williamson as the doctor turned Nome King. A notable character actor who just finished
the role of Merlin in the medieval John Boorman fantasy epic Excalibur,
Williamson makes the doctor/king into an almost Shakespearean devil comforting
you as he’s about to either zap your mind or swallow you whole.
Released theatrically in 1985 with an expensive promotional
campaign from Disney who spent $6 million just on advertising and a Return
to Oz float which paraded down Disneyland, the film flopped at the box
office taking in only $11 million against its $28 million budget. Critics were less than kind to this
extraordinarily dark and at times patently disturbing ‘kids/family’ film who
described it as a ‘horror show’ flying ‘under the banner of family
entertainment’. While the film garnered
an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects, the film which is still
black as pitch even now years later was perhaps poorly timed as dark fantasy
films such as it or Legend weren’t doing as well as their predecessors The
Neverending Story or Time Bandits.
Still, in the years since, Return to Oz has garnered a strong
cult following and Disney’s now sadly out-of-print Blu-ray disc edition still
goes up for hefty costs.
Seen years later on Blu-ray disc as well as 16mm theatrical
presentation, Return to Oz is at once closer to the tone and vibe of L.
Frank Baum’s books than, well, any other adaptation, and a still arduous
exhaustive unpleasantry that is so trained on the Sisyphean uphill horror
battle that it becomes somewhat despairing.
With early scenes of a strapped-down Dorothy being wheeled down a Jacob’s
Ladder hospital hallway while disembodied screams and moans from other
inmates echo the walls, most of the film taking place in ruin or darkness, it
might as well be an adult horror film starring a little kid. Not to mention it keeps diving deeper and
deeper into the mouth of Hell itself before any kind of glimmer of light or
hope starts to creep in. It could well
be among the most depressing children’s films ever made. With that, it also functions as a stark antidote
to the more bubbly-perky fantasy flicks the Disney company was previously known
for and it is clearly the highest watermark of the House of Mouse’s very brief
period of stoking an angry scary beast into terrorization of millions of young
unassuming filmgoers. Amazing that it
happened and highly unlikely anything remotely like it will ever happen to kids
movies again.
--Andrew Kotwicki
For further reading, check out Kyle Jonathan's review here!
