Quartile rating: 7/10 · 1 rating
While staying at a hotel in England with his grandmother, Helga, a young boy named Luke inadvertently spies on a convention of witches. The Grand High Witch reveals a plan to turn all children into mice via a magical formula. When they discover the eavesdropper, the witches test the formula on him. Now, with the help of Helga and hotel manager Mr Stringer, Luke the mouse must fight back against the witches.
The Witches is elevated primarily by Anjelica Huston's magnificently theatrical performance as the Grand High Witch, which is genuinely exceptional and carries the film. The plot is a reasonably faithful adaptation of Roald Dahl's darkly comic children's story, competently structured but not especially cinematic. Jim Henson's creature effects give the film a distinctive practical-effects charm that holds up well. The ending, however, is notably weak — the theatrical cut softened Dahl's original bleak conclusion by tacking on a happy resolution that undermines the story's subversive edge, earning it a below-average score. Novelty is decent but not outstanding; it occupies familiar Dahl territory of children-in-peril horror-fantasy without doing anything radically distinctive beyond Huston's performance.