And as a family entertainment, the sequel is not without its charms, cursed or otherwise. Not that Hocus Pocus 2’s target audience of 12 and under will necessarily care.
#Disney stars cursing movie#
Of course it’s unfair on some level to be comparing a new, perfectly innocuous family movie on streaming so intensely with the original, and yet the problem with nostalgia sequels is they retrace their predecessors’ footprints so studiously that it’s impossible to separate them.
It was a bold narrative twist on top of a spectacular musical sequence. The three evil witches were turning all the authority figures in the movie, including the protagonists’ parents, into damned marionettes, leaving the children alone. It came out of nowhere and was giddy while also being a little sinister. More importantly, however, the sequence in the original felt surprising. Among the more pedantic, narrative issues of the retread is that there’s no explanation for how Winifred knows a Blondie song, whereas in the original movie Winifred is seen eyeballing a sexy Halloween skeleton singer as he belts Jalacy “Screamin’ Jay” Hawkins’ classic. So when the Beaches star belts Blondie’s “One Way or Another,” the denizens just don’t dance, they become a proverbial army of synchronized ‘70s rockers out to do Winifred Sanderson’s bidding. In fact, the most lavish of the three(!) musical sequences in the sequel is bigger than anything seen in the original, at least in terms of extras: Midler and company, as the resurrected Sanderson Sisters, stand once more on a stage in front of the adults of Salem, and this time have a whole Halloween festival at their command.
#Disney stars cursing full#
And it’s a kind of credit to Hocus Pocus 2 that the movie is unafraid of going full tilt for it. Redoing such iconography is always the greatest intimidation, yet biggest audience expectation, that comes with remakes, reboots, and legacy sequels. Hence Hocus Pocus 2’s fundamental dilemma. It’s unlikely even Disney knew they had a classic Halloween scene on their hands when they put microphones in front of Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Kathy Najimy, and said “sing.” Yet the original Hocus Pocus of 1993 conjured real magic from the moment Midler teased, “I put a spell on you, and now you’re mine” to the scene’s finale in which Midler cursed all the adults of Salem to dance until they die! Thirty years on, that spell endures still, making the scene and the movie it’s borne from a stone cold holiday classic.
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