1. Ah, 1985. I was just a kid. A young kid. And my folks took me to see Walter Murch’s Return to Oz, an unofficial sequel to The Wizard of Oz.
Return to Oz is a film so bleak and dark and bizarre that its imagery still lives in the nooks of my nightmares.
2. Not that I didn’t enjoy Return to Oz—to be clear, I did. But it horrified me in ways that surpassed the deep horror I’d experienced viewing the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.
3. (The green Wicked Witch cackling “I’ll get you my pretty” in The Wizard of Oz being something of a founding moment of horrific horror, a horror amplified by my mother’s tendency to act out the line at weird moments as she tickled me or chased me or picked me up from school).
4. But Return to Oz: this movie is dark. It’s fucked up.
Dorothy gets institutionalized and treated with electroshock therapy. Then she goes to Oz, where she’s pursued by Wheelers, these things that roll around on rollerskate hands and feet, which, you know, should be whimsical, but are instead horrific. Then there’s this cabinet of detached heads, which could have been handled playfully, but no, instead it’s like something out of Hieronymus Bosch. Even Dorothy’s friends are these weird, off-putting versions that don’t match up to the original trio of Scarecrow, Tinman, and Lion. Instead we get Tik-Tok, an android who looks like a swollen pot-bellied C3PO, and Jack Pumpkinhead, a guy with a pumpkin for a head. These friends don’t look human at all (because they aren’t). There’s a quest; they cross a desert; they save the day, etc.
It ends with Dorothy returned, not exactly safely, to aunt and uncle.
5. So Disney made another unofficial sequel, Oz the Great and Powerful, this time from director Sam Raimi (Return’s Murch never directed another film, by the way). Despite his franchise work on the first trilogy of Spider-Man films, Raimi is an auteur who gave us cult classics like Darkman and the Evil Dead trilogy. I loved his last film Drag Me to Hell, which mixed humor with noir and genuine horror.
6. Oz the Great and Powerful is of course doomed, no matter how much money it makes. It’s doomed in the way that The Two Jakes was doomed, or Godfather III was doomed, or Citizen Kane 2: Electric Boogaloo was doomed: There’s no way that it can surpass, let alone stand up next to, the strength of the prototype.
7. Still, I think that if Raimi has brought enough of his own weirdness to the film, we might get a fascinating artifact. My real hope is that there will be a strong streak of Evil Dead 2 in Raimi’s Disney, a streak of bizarre dark weirdness to baffle and disturb a new generation. Hell, maybe I’ll take my kids.
Biblioklept 
One of my daughters is an Oz fanatic. She loves this movie – but not as much as the original Judy Garland film.
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No chance Raimi will match Return to Oz.
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this film scared the behaysus out of me – I might actually be a bit too afraid to watch it now, nearly 20 years later!
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this was an interesting twist on the story but a little to dark for me. I was just reminded of how creeped out I was when I got to minute marker 41:48 where you see all of the heads with wigs in the glass cases..
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[…] Watch Return to Oz, the Bizarre 1985 Sequel to The Wizard of Oz (Also: A Riff) (biblioklept.org) […]
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[…] Watch Return to Oz, the Bizarre 1985 Sequel to The Wizard of Oz (Also: A Riff) (biblioklept.org) […]
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Did you ever READ the books? I read THE WONDERFUL WIZARD before I watched the 1939 movie, so the film was a bit of a disappointment; RETURN TO OZ is truer to the spirit of the novels of Baum.
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I’m glad to read that: I was terrified as well… :)
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Aunt Em says that if you don’t lay again, she’s going to stew you up for supper
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I would have been around 5 when I saw this and it gave me nightmares!!! I was given a book that was based on stills from the movie and was scared of that too!! The thing that scared me the most was that blimmin ECT machine – scarred me for life, haven’t seen it since the 80’s but really feel this nostalgic need to watch… Very dark, chillingly (& this was Disney) I love that I’m not alone in how this movie made us feel as kids..
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If Frank Baum only knew. The founder of the ECT movement had a practice in NYC in a private mental hospital. The kids who were patients there would say, ‘don’t cough’ when Doctor was looking around for a new victim. It meant that if you coughed he would zap you for that. There were a number of elders as patients who were put in there by their children, because grandpa had lost grandma after 65 years of marriage and they didn’t want him depressing the kids moping around the house. So zap, zap, zap and the old buzzard forgot he ever had a wife.
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I just finished watching Return to Oz (VHS tape) with my 7 year old daughter. The tape started to mess up and I almost panicked thinking it had been messed up…I LOvED this movie as a kid and I am so glad my daughter loved it too. It’s a great movie and Mombi (that woman is incredible in this movie) has to have the scariest witch laugh I’ve ever heard in a movie ( watch the part where Dorothy escapes from her tower and the Gump is falling straight down). I think I’ll watch it again!!
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