Review: Thou wilt have a perfectly OK time with the Bette-middling ‘Hocus Pocus 2’

By a kind of coincidences that leads me to suspect witchcraft — or maybe simply the extra banal darkish magic of social media — this week has renewed some heated on-line chatter concerning the doubtful cultural legacies of two very completely different motion pictures. Certainly one of them is James Cameron’s 3-D wonderment “Avatar” (2009), which lately returned to theaters as a warm-up act for “Avatar: The Manner of Water.” That soon-to-arrive sequel will take a look at among the extra persistent putdowns of the primary “Avatar,” particularly that it was a uncommon field workplace juggernaut with a negligible pop-cultural imprint. It was an occasion film that everybody noticed, the argument goes, however few actually cherished.

The opposite film is the family-friendly supernatural comedy “Hocus Pocus” (1993), which, like “Avatar,” has now spawned a long-awaited follow-up. However not like “Avatar,” “Hocus Pocus” set no field workplace data on launch, broke no technological floor and acquired largely detached to hostile critiques. The ten-year-old me who noticed it in theaters (and numerous occasions afterward on VHS) would have provided one of many extra enthusiastic notices, received over by its wanly funny-spooky vibes, its now-creaky visible results and the shrieky rapport of Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy and Sarah Jessica Parker because the Sanderson Sisters, a trio of Seventeenth-century New England witches with a style for younger kids and archaic second-person-singular pronouns.

Mini-me additionally would have been delighted by the prospect of a sequel, if dissatisfied to listen to it could take virtually 30 years to get off the bottom. That prolonged gestation speaks to the lengthy, bizarre shelf lifetime of the primary “Hocus Pocus,” acquired as a campy misfire however reclaimed, over the many years, as a Halloween staple and (oc)cult basic. It occasioned fan guides, TV specials, theme-park sights and wildly widespread anniversary screenings, a few of them attended by ye olde authentic forged and crew. Parker even launched her personal spinoff sitcom, “Hex and the Metropolis.” OK, I madest that up.

Regardless of all this, the charms of “Hocus Pocus” stay elusive for a lot of, its retroactive reputation an ongoing supply of bafflement. “Hocus Pocus 2,” arriving this week on Disney+, is unlikely to clear up anybody’s confusion. However neither will it make anybody terribly sad. Directed by Anne Fletcher (“The Proposal,” “27 Clothes”) from a script by Jen D’Angelo, the film is a skinny however painless retread, cloaking its spinoff storytelling in a well-known cloak of fan gratification. It kicks off in Seventeenth-century Salem, Mass., the place a defiantly impious younger Winifred Sanderson (an excellent Taylor Henderson) flees into the forest along with her sisters, Mary (Nina Kitchen) and Sarah (Juju Journey Brener). There, they meet an older witch (“Ted Lasso’s” Hannah Waddingham) who bequeaths them a magic spellbook that may unlock their darkish powers.

Flash ahead to the current day, which occurs to be precisely 29 years after the occasions of the primary “Hocus Pocus,” when a virginal excessive schooler ill-advisedly resurrected the Sanderson Sisters for one Halloween evening of actually soul-sucking mayhem. That’s what occurs once more in “Hocus Pocus 2,” this time by means of a slightly smarter teenager, Becca (Whitney Peak), and a really dumb Salem historian, Gilbert (Sam Richardson), plus some tortuous story logic that brings the evil sisters whooshing again to life. Because the lip-smacking, incantation-hurling Winifred, Midler gorges herself anew on the surroundings and typically blasts it with lightning bolts. Najimy and Parker are additionally again as dopey Mary and ditzy Sarah, respectively, who dwell to smell out kids and lure them to a tasty demise.

The Sandersons’ shtick — half sub-Three Stooges slapstick, half “Saturday Evening Reside” parody of “The Crucible” — is not any extra intelligent or impressed than it was within the first film, however Midler, Najimy and Parker stay such sport performers, so adept at vampy antics and menacing facial contortions, that thou wilt not likely care. They’re significantly humorous in a single sequence by which Becca and her buddy, Izzy (Belissa Escobedo), attempt to distract the witches from their pedicidal rampage by taking them purchasing at Walgreens, the place they’re duly wowed by the superior sorcery of magnificence merchandise and automated sliding doorways.

Doug Jones within the film “Hocus Pocus 2.”

(Matt Kennedy)

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Aside from some issues involving the city’s geekily Halloween-obsessed mayor (Tony Hale), that’s about it for narrative novelty. “Hocus Pocus” die-hards received’t be stunned by the reappearance of Winifred’s undead paramour, Billy Butcherson (Doug Jones, lean, inexperienced and un-mean as he was within the first film). And after their 1993 rendition of “I Put a Spell on You,” after all the witches are obliged to revive their Vegas-style lounge act right here, this time whereas crashing (what else?) a Sanderson Sisters-themed costume contest — a self-congratulatory wink at how widespread the “Hocus Pocus” phenomenon has change into.

It has additionally change into, at the very least on this passably entertaining sequel, a softer, extra sentimental factor than in its earlier incarnation. Somewhat than sucking the souls of Salem’s kids, the witches determine to shore up their energy with the mom of all spells, initiating an “Into the Woods”-style quest for substances. Nobody bursts into Sondheim right here (a Blondie basic is the soundtrack spotlight), but it surely all builds to an appreciably shifting, even Sondheimian warning to watch out what thou wishest for. That poignancy units it other than the primary film, as does the truth that no one turns right into a cat this time round. For that, we’ll at all times have “Avatar.”