Hocus Pocus (1993)

Director: Kenny Ortega

Cast: Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker, Kathy Najimy, Thora Birch

Have I Seen it Before: Oh, sure. But I may be one of those people who didn’t come to the film on numerous airings on cable. It had an odd effect on me back then, but it’s possible a film which is unassailably played for laughs somehow unsettles a child under the age of ten. One might say there is something I saw it in the theater. Which, blah, blah, blah, I miss going to. I’d go to see almost anything, if it wasn’t a wildly irresponsible thing to do.

Cut to this very film being run at the local drive in currently, and me not wanting to go anyway. We’re all a big puddle of contradictions, no?

Did I Like It: It is, easily, the second-best Halloween-themed, non-cell-animated, Disney film of 1993.

That reads as a dig, I’m sure, but I’m pretty sure I intended it as a pledge of allegiance to The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993). The film is amiable enough, and objectively has the same kind of broad comedic mugging one might have experienced in a bygone era from either the Marx Brothers, Abbott, or Costello. It also has an early Amblin-esque energy about it that, while it never reaches for the pathos Spielberg could so easily achieve, even in his worst movies, it is as winning a framework to deliver entertainment as any.

Ultimately, I can’t fault a film entirely when both a) it clearly isn’t/wasn’t made for me and b) the three leads appear to be having a great deal of fun in their shenanigans. It’s little touches that capture my imagination after all these years, though. Primarily the delight in seeing Doug Jones do anything, but the idea that Garry and Penny Marshall are playing a married couple when they were, in fact, siblings, is definitely one of those strange quirks of cinema that one can’t help but dwell upon.

Matinee (1993)

Director: Joe Dante

Cast: John Goodman, Cathy Moriarty, Simon Fenton, Omri Katz

Have I Seen it Before: Many long years ago, it was one of those movies that I absolutely wanted to go to see, and indulgent parents allowed for it, as Goodman was a pleasing weekly presence on TV at the time… and… um, that’s still true, as it turns out.

Did I Like It: Absolutely. It’s a perfect tragedy that both Charlie Haas doesn’t get to write major motion pictures anymore, and that Joe Dante isn’t directing like he was in the 80s and 90s.

While not as manic as the other film that assembled this director/producer/screenwriting team—Gremlins 2: The New Batch (1990)—it is still a sweet movie that plays to my own tastes beautifully. Loving movies, even/especially the bad ones, and the places where they are played, all while the world is coming apart at the seams. 

It’s a special thing when a filmmaker can go to work, and as the viewer I can get the sense that we’d get along pretty well, with are tastes being so perfectly aligned.

There’s one scene that’s about as good as anything else gets. Goodman describing the magic of a theater. And yet, the film never forgets to have a fun time. Both films-within-films are delightful running gags, but The Shook-Up Shopping Cart—the less prominent of the two side-productions is a blissfully absurdist gag amid an otherwise mainstream film.

One wonders if they could have leaned into that more, as the film was ultimately doomed to be a drag on poor Universal’s resources. Naturally, no one knew that at the time, and there really isn’t any reason that the film shouldn’t have been one of the big moneymakers of the year.