The Witches (1990)
Directed by Nicolas Roeg
While staying at a hotel in England with his grandmother, Helga, a young boy named Luke inadvertently spies on a convention of witches. The Grand High Witch reveals a plan to turn all children into mice via a magical formula. When they discover the eavesdropper, the witches test the formula on him. Now, with the help of Helga and hotel manager Mr Stringer, Luke the mouse must fight back against the witches.
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What critics compared The Witches to
While many of the movies made of his work - The Witches, Matilda, Willy Wonka/Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - have been well received fan favorites, few have capture the underlying mischievousness of his motives…until now.
Roald Dahl's writing for children has only a moderate record of reaching the screen with its naughtiness intact - a pair of not-bad stabs at Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, a middling Matilda and Nicolas Roeg's paralysingly scary take on The Witches are among near-successes to date.
Nicolas Roeg had that very English sense of dry wit and joyous grotesquery in his adaptation of Dahl’s The Witches, which Spielberg misses, perhaps because his American soul can’t intuit the same.
The book was written by Roald Dahl, who also penned such children's classics as "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory," "James and the Giant Peach," "The Witches" and "Matilda."
On the pages of James and the Giant Peach, for instance, Aunt Sponge and Aunt Spiker get squashed to death by the titular peach as it rolls down the hill toward the sea; the main character in The Witches is never turned from a mouse back into a boy; and in The BFG, the title character’s brethren go out every night and snatch people out of their beds to eat them.
His spiky worldview is much better served in deliciously wicked versions like Mel Stuart’s “Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory,” Nicolas Roeg’s “The Witches” and Wes Anderson’s “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”
The brains behind such classics as "James and the Giant Peach", “The Witches”, "The Man from the South" (which was spoofed by Tarantino in his segment of "Four Rooms") and the unforgettable first episode of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" ("Lamb to the Slaughter"), Dahl made a name for himself with his playful intelligence, and decidedly twisted sense of humor.