The original Hocus Pocus didn’t impress Hollywood’s out-of-touch critic class, Save Jerseyans, but the Halloween classic quickly developed a cult following and remains a fan favorite for millennials who grew up trick-or-treating in the early ’90s (myself included).
I should have known better, but I was admittedly looking forward to kicking off the Halloween/autumn season by watching Hocus Pocus 2 with my family. My expectations weren’t sky-high given Hollywood’s history of screwing up sequels, it’s true, but I would’ve happily settled for a mediocre movie with a heaping helping of nostalgia. They didn’t need to do much to satisfy my modest expectations. The bar was low.
Unfortunately, the studio couldn’t even serve up a mediocre reboot and meet my minimal expectations. Apparently I’m not alone since the highly-anticipated sequel released directly to Disney+ has a sub-60% rating among critics and the audience on Rotten Tomatoes. This time around, everyone agrees that it sucks!
The spell is officially broken, and poor writing is once again the familiar culprit largely responsible for a thoroughly less-than-magical final product. Where to begin? The boring and unimaginative dialogue flatly delivered by the cast? The cringy song-and-dance number immediately following the witches’ reappearances after a three decade absence? The seeming lack of any coherent plot direction whatsoever?
Why so terrible? Once again, the lazy priority appeared to be cranking out a woke product at the expense of creating another timeless classic. It’s possible to be a little woke and serve up something entertaining (Netflix’s original series Stranger Things comes to mind). The major streaming content providers nevertheless seem incapable of consistently walking and chewing bubble gum at the same time. In this instance, corporate America (including Hollywood) tried to lurch Left but viewers generally desire escapism in their holiday movies; slavish and humorless conformity to a stagnant Leftist formula produces the exact opposite effect.
Here’s a partial list of that which ails Hocus Pocus 2:
- Blurring good and evil. In the original Hocus Pocus, the Sanderson Sisters were unambiguously the bad guys (or gals). They were ghoulish brides of Satan who, while undoubtedly entertaining by design, were also myopically driven by their goal of eating as many children’s souls as possible to stay alive and youthful. It doesn’t get any worse than eating kids, right? But this time around, the film begins with a flashback: the sisters as young Puritans in 17th century Salem when Winifred was being bullied into an arranged marriage by the male-led community. Back in present day, we’re told by the Salem magic shop owner that the sisters were misunderstood, and the obvious implication is that wasn’t really their fault that they were evil and wanted to eat kids. Did Larry Krasner get a producer credit for this thing? Then, what feels like hours later, the sisters get a sappy send-off when Bette Midler’s character chooses death rather than life without her sisters. It’s a boorishly familiar formula in modern Hollywood: sacrifice character complexity (which is harder to pull off) in favor of propagating moral ambiguity.
- Anti-Christian themes. Hollywood’s disdain for organized religion and specifically the Judeo-Christian tradition is well-established. In the original, the teen heroes are relatively normal kids intrigued by the story of the Sanderson sisters. ‘Normal’ is no longer in vogue. For Hocus Pocus 2, the primary protagonists (two young teenagers) are moody Wicca fan girls who dabble in black magic at the onset of the movie, discover their own witchcraft abilities when brought into conflict with the Sandersons, and appear to form their own coven at the end of the film. Don’t jump down my throat: I’m a huge fan of the Harry Potter books! I’m not offended by magic in the fantasy context. I am offended by lazy writing, and the Puritan minister in the Salem of the Sandersons’ youth is naturally portrayed as a patriarchal bad guy and, after initially pursuing a quest for immortality like in the first film, the Sandersons decide their new goal is getting revenge on the minister’s living descendants. We get it: Hollywood hates Christians and believe they’re history’s villains. Didn’t need another film to confirm that!
- Woke/PC casting decisions. Relax. I also couldn’t care less whether the main characters are white or not. What’s notable here is how the movie’s producers are clearly playing the ‘check the box’ game even when it makes little contextual sense. Did you notice the black Puritan in the first village scene? That’s a nuance of colonial history I must’ve missed! Meanwhile, the only two white males – the mayor (Buster from Arrested Development and Gary from Veep) and one of the girls’ boyfriends – are depicted as the village idiots. “The stupid male” trope is a favorite of advertisers and, as of late, the movie-making crowd, too. One of the two primary female leads cracks an anti-patriarchy joke because you can’t make anything in 2022 with a Gen Z female character unless she establishes herself as a feminist. We also get a quick scene of two gay men cozily watching the original Hocus Pocus on their couch. I’ll say it again… not offended by gay characters! But it truly did feel like this movie’s creators worked off of a list of necessary Lefty elements and then, working backwards, tried to build some semblance of movie around them.
Meanwhile, over at the box office, the widely-advertised ‘Bros’ film (billed as the first all-gay romantic comedy to reach the big screen and apparently full of raunchy sex) posted a disastrous opening weekend.
Are you noticing a pattern? It’s hard to miss.
Hollywood and its cultural allies would have us believe they’re pumping out Leftist-approved content because that’s where consumers are.
That may be where things are heading (TBD), but it’s clearly not where Americans are today.
