Ha ha, let us briefly consider the career of George Miller!
No, not George “The Man From Snowy River”
Miller, the other one! (It’s amusing that both these Millers are Australian, ha
ha!) The Miller we’re concerned with today started out as a doctor, they say!
Then he made a terrific car crash picture, Mad
Max! He followed that up with an even better car crash picture, Mad Max 2, better known as The Road Warrior! Then he took a brief
detour and made the best segment in the Twilight
Zone movie, and after that paired up with another director named George
(Ogilvie, not the other Miller for some reason) and made yet another car crash
picture, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome!
Ha ha, so there he sits, the Car Crash King from Down Under,
waiting for Hollywood to come a-knocking! And they did, probably with car crash
scripts under their arms! But what Miller ended up doing, strangely enough, was
the picture ol’ Burl is reviewing for you today, The Witches of Eastwick!
I remember thinking at the time “Ha ha, that’s weird!” But I
dutifully went to see the picture anyway, being that I was a fan of the car
crash pictures and had been assured by Fangoria
magazine that the new movie contained Special Makeup Effects by a master of
that art, Rob “The Thing” Bottin! And
indeed it did! But first there was a whole lot of Battle of the Sexes satire –
a big thing in late-80s cinema, ha ha – and showcase moments for Jack Nicholson
in his role as the devil! You can practically see the cast and crew moving
furniture out of the way to make room for Jack to do his thing, and flashbacks
from The Shining are a distinct
possibility!
The picture takes place in the button-down New England
community of Eastwick, where three divorcées (or widows in one case) are,
unbeknownst to even themselves, either straight-up witches or just possessed of
a feminine power that allows them to cause strange happenings when they all
concentrate together! Of course the three ladies are played by Cher, Susan
Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer, because who else at that time could have played
those roles? Oh sure, Glenn Close, Kelly McGillis and Daryl Hannah might have
done fine, but, ha ha, would they have played tennis quite as well?
Anyway, they conjure up Jack one rainy night, and he seduces
them one by one, and then they all live together for a time in a state of
bacchanalian bliss, and the townsfolk, led by the slowly-going-insane Veronica “Alien” Cartwright, turn against them;
and then the third act is filled with trick effects as the ladies try to get
rid of their new friend!
It’s a reasonably sprightly picture, generally very pleasant
to look at, and Miller does a good job of directing it! There’s even a car
chase, ha ha, and some good trick effects! Nicholson becomes a giant creature
of some kind, and then turns into what can only be described as a bugchild! And
there are some solid actors in the margins: outside of Cartwright, who gives a
very game performance, you have Carel Struycken, well known from his
performance in The Prey, as the
manservant Fidel, and Richard Jenkins, looking pretty much the same as he would
in The Cabin in the Woods, Killing Them Softly and Jack Reacher twenty-five years later!
But it’s also got a lot less going on than it thinks it
does, and if it ever did have an edge to it – I believe it was thought to back
in the 80s – then the passage of time has sanded it off! As well, as other
reviewers have pointed out, every scene seems to repeat itself three times out
of the equal-billing-and-screen-time contractual obligations that came with the
three starlets! It gets a bit much, and the picture seems overlong as a result!
You sure can't accuse The Road Warrior
of that, ha ha! So after some thought, I’m going to give The Witches of Eastwick two broken voo-doo dolls!
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