One had learned not to expect too much from Nicolas Roeg (Insignificance, Eureka, Aria...). One had not been prepared, quite, to expect a children's film. The hero-figure with whom that audience is supposed to identify is a bespectacled little orphan whose Norwegian grandmother has immersed in the lore of witches, and who fittingly stumbles into a witches' convention (under cover of The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children) at a seaside resort in Cornwall, gets transmogrified into a mouse by the Grand High Witch (Anjelica Huston, in as hammy a performance as any of her father's), and in that form has to combat a plot to work the same magic on the entire juvenile population of England. Sort of a Beatrix Potter Meets Ian Fleming. Granted that Roeg respects the rights of children to their darker thoughts, and that the profiling of the Weird Sisterhood, though primarily verbal, doesn't pull its punches. But any such unpleasantnesses are nothing compared to the torment that awaits the grown viewer -- the pre-teen one might still not mind -- once the witches come out from under their wigs and the hero is shrunk to thumb-size. Once, to be more exact, Roeg avails himself of the yukkies and cuddlies of Jim Henson's Creature Shop. It doesn't help matters that the furry little buff-colored puppet retains a human voice ("Don't cry, Grandma. It's okay. Things could've been worse"); and one of the crueler aspects of the witch's curse turns out to be the wide-angle lenses through which Roeg stretches and strains to empathize with the world-view of a rodent. One is never far, at these times, from wistful thoughts of what the Disney animators might have made of this at the height of their powers. And it's a short step from there to the brutal conclusion that the story, which started at a Roald Dahl novel, is not now in its most accommodating medium. (1990) — Duncan Shepherd
This movie is not currently in theaters.