On Halloween night in Salem, Massachusetts, three evil sisters are brought back to life to release terror into the country side and it is now up to two teenage girls and a perpetual cat to end this terror once and for all.
As Shakespeare would have certainly written if he'd been on the movie beat, "Double, double toil and trouble, movie stink and critic bubble/'Hocus Pocus' has no focus/has no rhyme, has no reason/ and is... out of season."
Forget amusement parks and hockey teams. It's in movie comedies that Disney is having its real crisis, as evidenced by this would-be laugh-getter that begins with the murder of a child and a triple hanging.
Perhaps I underestimate the power of its generational hold, yet considering the potential of a broad Disney witch romp, Hocus Pocus is an incredibly mediocre movie.
This is one of the oddest releases of the summer, and it's hard to imagine it finding a broad audience. With the rather ghoulish deaths of children depicted, it's certainly too strong for very young moviegoers.
Though children may be satisfied (if the witch stuff doesn't scare them) adults will have a harder time with the by-the-numbers confrontations between the witches and the plucky youths.
