Return to Oz

Today's news about Anne Hathaway playing Judy Garland in the upcoming biopic Get Happy got me thinking about this...

Return to Oz

I've turned quite a few people on to Return to Oz, one of my childhood films that more or less scarred me for life. Not too long ago I bought the DVD after years and years of not seeing it. I was sure that it couldn't be as trippy, or even as scary, as I remembered it, but I was wrong. Return to Oz stands the test of time. The film acts as a sequel to the Wizard of Oz, following Dorothy played by Fairuza Balk (long before The Craft, and even before The Worst Witch), who is battling insomnia and "crazy dreams" of a far off land called Oz. So her aunt and uncle send her to a mental institution... which is just terrifying. From there, Dorothy manages to escape and get back to Oz, where she finds that everything has changed and the Emerald City has become a wasteland. With both old and new friends, she must find a way to bring Oz back to life.

The film is unbelievably creepy from start to finish, and I was wondering who's seen it? Cause if you haven't I suggest you take an odd nostalgia trip down the yellow brick road and check it out. Of course, since I saw it as a kid, the film has a lot more sense memory ingrained into it for me (a lot like Flight of The Navigator, anyone seen that?), but I am telling you, today, it is still one of the scariest films I have ever seen. There are these things called Wheelers, and they still haunt my dreams. And yes, it was marketed as a children's movie. How they got away with a PG rating, I'll never know...