Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) Review

A dark and brooding look at the sinful desires that corrupt people is not what you would expect out of Disney as a theater goer in the early Eighties. Yet that is exactly what this movie is. When a strange carnival named Dark's Pandemonium arrives at a small town, harrowing encounters with Dark and his minions follow. Soon the lives of the townsfolk are on the line, if not their very souls.  Filled with horror, regrets, and menace the movie is ultimately about fathers and sons. UPDATED January 2014 with better screen captures and completely rewritten text.

The late Seventies had not been kind to the Walt Disney company at the box office. In an attempt to regain lost audiences the studio had been moving more toward the serious side in their films; starting in 1979 with The Black Hole and the dollowing year with The Watcher in the Woods. 1982 was supposed to be the year of big change with the experimental TRON and this gothic movie hitting theaters to revitalize the company’s box office success.

Alas, that plan fell apart due to a disastrous test screening that led to reshoots a year later designed to make the movie more acceptable to a family audience. However, those changes did not change the movie enough and the end result was still a dark and terrifying movie that was guaranteed to give small kids nightmares.

Ray Harryhausen Died

The master of visual effects Ray Harryhausen was 92. I recently was talking to a high school senior who surprised me because he was trying to remember films he loved as a kid to get on Blu-ray. Those films turned out to be Jason and the Argonauts and the Sinbad movies that were Harryhausen’s babies. I’d watched Clash of the Titans a few weeks back and thought to myself that it was the perfect swan song for his stop motion effects.

The movies he made were magic to me growing up and the creatures may have moved in jerky fashion, but they all had real personalities. In the end, that was the secret to Harryhausen’s success. Somehow he imbued his creations with a feeling that they had emotions in such a way that kids of all ages could instantly connect with them. It made the movies such a delight on a Saturday afternoon.

Ray may be gone, but his spirit remains. If you loved the cave troll in Fellowship of the Ring, that was a true homage in CGI of what he did. So many directors and special effects artists were inspired by him that he’ll never really be gone from cinema.

Now he’s off in the afterlife with his best friend Ray Bradbury probably coming up with some new wild idea to play with on a galactic scale.