If only it had happened.........for who better to bring Bradbury to the screen than a dancer-choreographer.......who could potentially find the visual equivalent of Bradbury's nimble, sprightly prose.
Alas. Not only did "Something Wicked This Way Comes" land at the wrong studio, Disney, but at the worst time for Disney.......a studio adrift, swirling in failure and uncertainty as it struggled to survive in an ever-changing movie marketplace.
Disney's tentative steps to compete in the mainstream met with rejection and disaster, including their sci-fi epic "The Black Hole" and their first misbegotten, botched attempt at a horror film, "The Watcher In The Woods".
"Something Wicked..." followed in that sorry tradition, with Disney executives second-guessing, re-rigging and tinkering the film into oblivion. It's sadly telling that when it came time for these films to appear on video, Disney sold them off to the Anchor Bay label, like unwanted orphan children.......
We can only speculate that if this project had sat a few years until it fell under the umbrella of the newly revitalized Disney led by Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg, it might have gotten the creative tender loving care it deserved.
Under the mismanagement of early 80's Disney, Bradbury's novel, a dreamlike mixture of whimsical nostalgia and horror, got flattened, cheapened and made to look like a quickie made-for-TV movie. Last minute attempts by Disney animators and special effects staff to hastily smear cartoonish visuals on the footage only served to heighten the overall mediocrity of what they were trying so desperately to save.......
The bright spots..........Jason Robards as the elderly librarian tormented by his roads-not-taken......that walking talking icon Royal Dano as the lightning rod salesman......Jonathon Pryce as the smoothly demonic Mr. Dark......and in a surprising flash of brilliant casting, Pam Grier as the seductive Carnival Dust Witch......
The low spots..........pretty much everything else, including the two untalented little shlubs picked to play the film's leads. Eisner and Katzenberg, we think, might have taken the trouble to recruit some truly gifted child actors. But the fading, exhausted regime overseeing "Something Wicked..." settled for generic central casting kids, further wounding the film.
Always depressing, posting about such a painful, missed-opportunity movie..... for Ray Bradbury alone, we'll scrape up 2 stars (**)..........Memo to remake-crazy Hollywood execs.......hey, guys, how about this one?
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