Return to Oz
- Thread starter Kisito
- Start date
Benjamin
The Living Force
It's hard for me to describe how long I've been having these sporadic memory 'flashes' and strange feelings but for the past months or years I've been getting exactly these and just couldn't place them. They felt so familiar but elusive at the same time. Then just last week after a HBOT session, it hit me: Return to Oz (1985). A strange feeling came over me and so I looked for a copy on Amazon. I was able to pick up a used DVD in excellent condition for pretty cheap. It came today and I just finished watching it. I now know where all the 'elusiveness' was coming from! I had (not quite, apparently) completely forgotten this movie.
It's classified as a 'dark fantasy', and it is, for Disney: the wilful confinement and electroshock 'therapy' of children, the creepy Wheelers, an entire population turned to stone, a room of still living severed heads on display that an evil lady can swap out her own head for, Jack Pumpkinhead who is a good character but looks à la Tim Burton, being turned to sand if you touch the Deadly Desert, and the Gnome King who lives under a mountain and evolves from rock to flesh with every being changed into an object when they lose his game.
Really effective use of claymation for the faces in the rocks, fantastic sets, some funny moments, and the room of objects that had a really weird ambiance. It's that room that I had the strongest memory of, which isn't saying much after 40 years. The whole movie had a slight Jim Henson Labyrinth (1986) vibe to it, which incidentally had George Lucas as executive producer. Interestingly, in the credits of Return to Oz, Lucas is given a 'special thank you'.
I don't really know why I was getting these elusive 'memories'. It wasn't really for nostalgia reasons since I remember I didn't really like the movie on the whole when I first saw it as a kid. I mean, I remember wanting the human versions of the Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Man like in the original movie. I also felt that it moved too quickly. I still do. But seeing this movie now as an adult has put the pieces back together and maybe that was the point. If there's some kind of greater 'timing element' involved with remembering this movie right now, that might be up for debate or might be just coincidence. Anyway, I'll give the movie a 3-3.5/5.
(This 'review' probably doesn't belong in the PSI thread but it was the only one with the appropriate title.)
It's classified as a 'dark fantasy', and it is, for Disney: the wilful confinement and electroshock 'therapy' of children, the creepy Wheelers, an entire population turned to stone, a room of still living severed heads on display that an evil lady can swap out her own head for, Jack Pumpkinhead who is a good character but looks à la Tim Burton, being turned to sand if you touch the Deadly Desert, and the Gnome King who lives under a mountain and evolves from rock to flesh with every being changed into an object when they lose his game.
Really effective use of claymation for the faces in the rocks, fantastic sets, some funny moments, and the room of objects that had a really weird ambiance. It's that room that I had the strongest memory of, which isn't saying much after 40 years. The whole movie had a slight Jim Henson Labyrinth (1986) vibe to it, which incidentally had George Lucas as executive producer. Interestingly, in the credits of Return to Oz, Lucas is given a 'special thank you'.
I don't really know why I was getting these elusive 'memories'. It wasn't really for nostalgia reasons since I remember I didn't really like the movie on the whole when I first saw it as a kid. I mean, I remember wanting the human versions of the Scarecrow, Lion and Tin Man like in the original movie. I also felt that it moved too quickly. I still do. But seeing this movie now as an adult has put the pieces back together and maybe that was the point. If there's some kind of greater 'timing element' involved with remembering this movie right now, that might be up for debate or might be just coincidence. Anyway, I'll give the movie a 3-3.5/5.
(This 'review' probably doesn't belong in the PSI thread but it was the only one with the appropriate title.)
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