The poster for Return to Oz proclaims it “an all-new live-action fantasy—filled with Disney adventure and magic”. This is technically true, in the same way that Cerberus—the monstrous three-headed beast that guards the underworld in Greek mythology—is technically a dog.
It’s been six months since Dorothy Gale (Fairuza Balk) was swept away to the Land of Oz and back again and readjusting to life in Kansas has been difficult. She rarely sleeps through the night and spends her days talking about people, places and things her Aunt Em (Piper Laurie) and Uncle Henry (Matt Clark) are certain don’t exist. In fact, Aunt Em is so convinced Dorothy is mentally unstable that she carts her into town to be examined by Dr. Worley (Nicol Williamson)—and in the first of the film’s many terrors, surrenders her niece to his dubious care. One abortive attempt at electroshock later and Dorothy flees into the thunderstorm raging outside.
She wakes up in an Oz that’s grimmer than she remembers. The Yellow Brick Road is overgrown, its bricks pulled loose. The Emerald City is in ruins, its residents turned to stone. And the Scarecrow is missing. The calamities are all tied to the mysterious Princess Mombi (Jean Marsh) and the Nome King (Williamson, in a dual role). So, Dorothy sets out to tackle them with the help of a ragtag band of friends, including: Billina (voiced by Denise Bryer), a chicken who hitched a ride with her from Kansas; Tik-Tok (voiced by Sean Barrett), a mechanical soldier; and Jack Pumpkinhead (voiced by Brian Henson), a living stick man with a carved pumpkin for a head.
Return to Oz is weird. Perhaps that isn’t unusual for a fantasy film. But fantasies about shuttling between the everyday and the extraordinary usually set a baseline for mundanity first. Not so here. This is likely the only Disney film in which the heroine is strapped onto a gurney, wheeled into an operating theatre and confronted with a pair of metallic headphones sizzling with electricity—and destined for her head.
The asylum scenes are just the beginning. It’s as if Walter Murch—a veteran editor and sound designer making his directorial debut—set out to give his audience a fright without realising how deeply he might disturb them. Dorothy’s wanderings through the Emerald City are interrupted by the Wheelers: grotesque, grinning creatures who cackle and squawk and prowl about on all fours (each limb ends in a wheel). When they give chase, the fact that their outfits suggest the aftermath of a street battle between punks and carnival barkers makes them more terrifying, not less.
How traumatised you are may depend on your familiarity with L. Frank Baum’s books. The only one I’ve read is The Marvelous Land of Oz, which introduces Jack and Mombi but doesn’t include Dorothy. (Murch and his co-writer Gill Dennis adapted elements of it and the next book in the series, Ozma of Oz, for Return to Oz’s screenplay.) It’s an idiosyncratic, compelling book, full of sing-song logic and fantastic set pieces, capped off by an ending Baum doesn’t seem to notice might be disquieting.
Murch’s film follows suit, immersing us in a world that’s decidedly other. Some of it is whimsical. Tik-Tok, the one-man Royal Army of Oz, is an incongruously cuddly automaton: short, squat, largely spherical and brought to life by practical effects so tactile, you could almost reach out and touch the burnished copper. Some of it is lyrical, like David Shire’s score. And some of it is nightmarish. Mombi leads Dorothy down a corridor decorated with young women’s heads, each displayed in a numbered glass case. (The production design, by Anthony Pratt and Norman Reynolds, is outstanding.) Any doubt as to what purpose they serve vanishes when Mombi casually swaps her head for another from her collection.
All of this is jarring to audiences expecting a sequel to The Wizard of Oz (1939). And why wouldn’t they? Despite being made over four decades after its predecessor, with a different cast and by a different crew and studio, Return to Oz still presents itself as a direct continuation of the 1939 classic. The impulse to do so is understandable. MGM’s Technicolor dreamland dominates all other visions of Oz in the popular imagination, even Baum’s own. (It’s a rare person who, when asked to describe Dorothy’s footwear, thinks of Baum’s sliver shoes rather than MGM’s ruby slippers.) Yet this dooms Murch’s film to comparisons that are to its detriment.
Luckily, the performances are solid. Fairuza Balk makes Dorothy all her own, treating the oddities around her with the utmost sincerity and imbuing her with practicality and kindness, even in the face of peril. Nicol Williamson is a serpentine presence and Jean Marsh a more straightforwardly alarming one. Both are fine foils for Balk and their commitment is admirable; no child who witnesses their performances will escape unscathed.
Return to Oz was made by people with imagination and an eagerness to take risks. But whom did they make it for? The film is too dark to be standard Disney fare yet too squarely aimed at children to be solely for adults. It’s too unlike its MGM predecessor yet too much of a hodgepodge of Baum’s books to satisfy fans of either—and too unsettling for just about everyone. It’s worth experiencing at least once. Whether you return is up to you.
Leave a Reply