Hocus Pocus 2
Kathy Najimy, Bette Midler, and Sarah Jessica Parker hope to conjure nostalgic magic with Hocus Pocus 2.
Abraca- don’t
It’s been 29 years since a group of teens brought back the Sanderson Sisters, famous witches who cursed the town of Salem when they were hanged. The teens in 1993 were able to banish the sisters and lift the curse, or so they thought.
Now, teen Becca (Whitney Peak) is into the witching arts. Every Halloween, Becca teams up with her friends Izzy (Belissa Escobedo) and Cassie (Lilia Buckingham) to perform magic incantations in the woods outside of Salem. This year is a little different. First, Becca and Izzy have been dumped by Cassie, who’s too occupied with her boyfriend to worry about her best friends. Second, Becca accidentally conjures the Sanderson Sisters.
Whoops.
Now, the witches are back. Sisters Winifred (Bette Midler), Mary (Kathy Najimy), and Sarah (Sarah Jessica Parker) are stalking the streets of Salem again, looking for a spell that will grant them the ultimate power. They also want revenge on the descendants of the minister who drove them from the village when they were young girls.
It’s up to Becca and her friends to stop the Sandersons and save Salem, but the girls soon learn that real magic has some drawbacks they hadn’t anticipated.
I’ll admit that while I bear no ill will toward the original Hocus Pocus, it was an amusing movie with silly scares, I also don’t have the nostalgic love for it that others do. It is, however, the perfect amount of family fun for little ones to enjoy the Spooky Season. The sequel is as lifeless as the reanimated corpse of Billy Butcherson that bumbles through the scenes.
At least the original had a talking cat.
Another example of a studio commodifying millennial nostalgia to sell us a low-effort movie, Hocus Pocus 2 is hoping you have fond memories of the 1993 movie and won’t pay attention to all the shoddy filmmaking that went into the sequel.
Look, I get it, getting old isn’t fun. Millennials are dealing with the climate crisis, inflation, job dissatisfaction, and now all our backs hurt and our knees pop when we get up from the sofa — it’s a lot. And because of that, we are clinging to things we remember from childhood. Suddenly, Hocus Pocus isn’t just a movie you watched on the Disney Channel because you were bored on a Tuesday, it’s a classic.
And Disney knows this, which is why we can’t be more than five years away from The Goofy Movie getting a reboot or a sequel.
But the problem inherent with this isn’t that Disney is feeding our nostalgia, the problem is the movies they’re giving us are terrible.
Case in point: Director Anne Fletcher seems to systematically dismantle all the things that the original movie had going for it. Every shot seems like a cynical rehash of moments we remember from the film or some sort of meta joke that doesn’t land well. The sisters don’t know the words lotion or aisle, but blithely yell “Time Hack!” when given a tip on sucking the souls from children. There’s also a framing device — a red and black bird — that makes no sense, because the creature inhabiting the bird appears once, and only to the Sanderson Sisters.
We get less time with the kids, to the point that their friendship is the real magic journey seems tacked on and silly. The sets look like they belong at a local high school production — the last film’s denouement took place in a cemetery, but this time around Disney couldn’t even spring for tombstones, all you’re getting is a sparse forest.
There’s another problem: Disney has given up the idea of having villains in their movies. No one is evil, everyone has trauma, and all women are just trying to #girlboss in an oppressive world. It’s like Disney read a Buzzfeed article called “Why these 10 Disney Villains were really feminist icons” and decided to make it their narrative policy moving forward. Now, we get a backstory on the Sanderson Sisters, something that excuses some of their past behaviors and outright rewrites other elements of it. It’s the same trick they pulled in Cruella and it’s just as sloppily done here.
And by taking away, or at least taking the teeth out of their villains, we now have a movie that just sort of…is. In the first Hocus Pocus, the witches kill a child within 5 minutes of being introduced. Now? They’ll zap you, but like… killing children is mean. The kids aren’t drinking or getting bullied because both of those things are wrong. The scars on the spell book, which was made of human skin, aren’t as noticeable because we wouldn’t want anything in this movie to be interesting or frightening. Even Sarah Jessica Parker’s witch gets a personality rewrite because it isn’t acceptable to hit on teenage boys now, nor is it ok for her sisters to call her stupid. So she must stand up to them and speak her truth because god forbid any bit of this film has a sense of humor.
As far as the acting goes, the teens are doing their best with underwritten roles. Midler, Parker, and Najimy all ham it up, but things seem rather low energy when they start threatening people. Midler is happier when Winifred gets a song (of which, sigh…there are two), so she can coast on her stage presence, but there’s no denying a lot of the menace is gone.
If you have fond memories of the first film, there might be something in this mess to entertain you. But like most nostalgia-based cash grabs, it’s a cynical exercise in exploiting your memories for a quick buck. Instead, watch the original and enjoy the memories of screening it during your childhood.
Verdict: The Sanderson Sisters may not suck the souls out of children anymore, but they’ve certainly sucked the soul out of this franchise.
Hocus Pocus 2 is rated PG and available on Disney+
