Review of Escape to Witch Mountain (1995) by Edith N — 28 Aug 2012

Why Did This Need a Remake Even Farther From the Book?

I didn't read the book until high school. I think I discovered it in the school library, though I might have picked it up at a book sale somewhere. By that point, I had seen the movie I don't know how many times. It was on heavy rotation on the Disney Channel when I was young. This means that it is one of several movies where I forgive the difference between book and movie, and one of two because the movie was beloved Disney fare from before I read the book. The differences are small in some ways and vast in others, but the changes seem to have been made to make the characters more appealing, to avoid some of the touchier issues of the book. The movie does not require a stand on Catholicism or the problems with authority figures. The characters in the book are teenagers; they are inner city kids who are not looked after in a youth home by a kindly grandmother type. They are under the threat of juvenile hall from the beginning.

But here, Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and Tia (Kim Richards) Malone are just shy of puberty. They lived with a woman they called Granny Malone, but she has died, and they are sent to a large old house which is now an orphanage. Tony and Tia has secret powers, which they must be careful to keep from strangers. Only one day, Tia saves the life of a man named Lucas Deranian (Donald Pleasence) by predicting that his car will be in an accident and that he shouldn't stay in it. Deranian works for another man, a rich and powerful man named Aristotle Bolt (Ray Milland), who wants Tony and Tia's powers for himself. Tony and Tia sense that he is not a pleasant man, and Tia is having flashbacks of memory to their first arrival in the United States from somewhere far away. They escape from Bolt's estate and go after their people, whom they believe to be somewhere called Witch Mountain. On the way, they meet a crusty old man named Jason O'Day (Eddie Albert), who helps them.

I mean, it's one heck of a cast, isn't it? Oh, I didn't realize that when I was a kid and the movie was only about a decade old. (As was I!) However, while only Milland was an Oscar winner (1945; [i]The Lost Weekend[/i]), all three of its adult stars had long and impressive film careers before ending up in this. How and why they all ended up in this, I cannot say, but the material doesn't do too badly by any of them. Albert in particular gets a role more complicated than the standard "man who ends up helping kids despite a crusty exterior" role. Yeah, okay, he has to deliver some cheesy lines on the drive to Witch Mountain, but he also gets to display genuine emotion. He doesn't want to like the kids, but by the end of things, they have come to mean quite a lot to him. He is also given a believable motivation; he doesn't want to help a couple of strays. Instead, he wants to get one over on a powerful man a little too used to having his own way.

Let's also give a major "for its time" for the special effects. There was a stretch there when Disney movies were really state-of-the-art. [i]Tron[/i], after all, was a Disney movie. It's true that you can often see the wires when Tony and Tia are making things move, but the spaceship (a spoiler, but one given away by the entire ad campaign of the remake) is really nicely done. The difficulties involved in working with children, animals, and special effects must have been sizable ones, but the movie mostly pulls it off. Come to that, they could have used substantially less in the way of special effects and still had a believable story, but they decided to go all out. Tony and Tia can do amazing things, and the movie wants to be sure that we know that. And we are, we really are. Audiences back in 1975 must have known it even more than audiences today, and the effects are still better than some you see in even theatrical release movies currently being made for kids.

And make no mistake--the main audience for this movie is kids. Just because I think it's interesting and entertaining doesn't mean that everyone will; I can't say for sure how much of my love of this movie is purely the nostalgia factor. It's the risk you run with talking about movies you've loved for twenty-five years, no matter how old you were when you first saw them. It only gets worse if you were a child. Children often have bad filters for quality, and I'm not going to pretend that mine were great even though I believe they were better than those of a lot of the people around me. (I, for one, never liked the New Kids on the Block even though I was their absolute target demographic.) You have my advice that this is a movie well worth seeing. I can't say that you, personally, will like it anywhere near as much as I do--and perhaps you'll like the book better, or worse. Taste is a subjective thing, and I guess by coming to this site and reading my reviews, you're showing that you care about mine. Even though neither of us many know why.