Only now does it occur to me... HANSEL AND GRETEL (1987)

Only now does it occur to me... how much narrative padding has to go into HANSEL AND GRETEL to make it feature-length. Let's be honest, the bullet points are these: mom and dad are struggling; Hansel and Gretel go into the woods on an errand (or are abandoned there by their parents, depending on the telling), find the witch's candy house, almost get eaten by the witch, and then they shove her into the oven. There's a reason why the best film version (Tim Burton's) runs about 35 minutes. But this is not early Tim Burton––it's a Cannon MovieTale.

That's right: the children's movie/fairy tale offshoot of Cannon Films (probably only created to get a tax break or something), the same one that brought us Christopher Walken as PUSS IN BOOTS. And, hoo boy, this thing is a mess. As the parents, we have David Warner (TIME BANDITS, TRON, TITANIC, TWIN PEAKS) and Emily Richards (EMPIRE OF THE SUN, ENEMY AT THE DOOR), who clearly deserve better. There's a lot of dignity up for grabs here. Look at Emily Richards, she's so upset she can barely stand up by herself. For starters, she's dressed like an Oktoberfest wench at a knock-off Disneyland.

And poor David Warner. He's trying his best. He's wearing a community theater peasant blouse they stole from a production of THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE. They didn't even launder it first.

They pad this shit with 44 minutes of family drama before we even see the candy house. Lotta Aryan-types moping and puttering around a medieval cabin. It's like the world's worst Ingmar Bergman film. 

Finally, the candy house. You'd have to imagine this would be a holy grail for a production designer––you could really go nuts with it. Instead we get this sad sack shit.
They thought they could jazz it up with some half-assed star bows from the Dollar Store that were lying around in somebody's junk drawer. A child would have done a better job.

You'd think you couldn't get any more depressed. Maybe if they shoehorned in an Oscar-winning actress who deserves a lot better? Somebody like Cloris motherfuckin' Leachman (THE LAST PICTURE SHOW, THE TWILIGHT ZONE, DILLINGER, DAISY MILLER, YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN)?

At least she has fun with it. You can tell she wasn't directed at all. None of this movie was. Half of her shots have her leering and extending her fingernails like she was told to "act witchy" and then they forgot to say "Cut!" She gets to go full-HOCUS POCUS soon enough, and in one of the film's two stylistic decisions, they give her some SUSPIRIA-style Argento lighting. 

 

So there's that, at least. She just keeps going, though, cause, like I said, they totally forgot to say "Cut!"

She captures the kiddies and we get a few iconic images.

I recommend singing aloud––to the tune of Nazareth's "Hair of the Dog"––"Now you're messin' with a... Leach-man wiii-iiitch! Now you're messin' with a Leachman witch!"

We even learn that her grounds are populated with the still-living bodies of her victims, children who have been entombed within weeping gingerbread men:

"If you look closely, you can see the tears." Hell, that shoulda been the tag-line to this movie. Speaking of which, throughout, all of this is crosscut with David Warner wandering in the woods, looking for his kids.

It's very post-Beckett, and we return to it a comical number of times. Yep, time to check in on Warner again. No dialogue. Just fruitless searching. And disappointment. It's sweaty out there. If you look closely, you can see the tears.

He's giving us some real "I need to fire my agent" vibes. It's great.

They try to make it a plot point that the witch can't see without her magical, enchanted magnifying glass

but it's totally one of those plastic magnifying glasses that you get as a prize from a cereal box. It doesn't even have glass as a lens, only thickened plastic. Tough to sell it as a magic totem, is what I'm saying. Anyway, the kids lower her into a subterranean oven with a rope (which is much less satisfying than shoving her into a more conventional stove)

 

but then comes the coup de grâce, and the second creative stylistic decision the filmmakers made. That's right, the house explodes in a SHINING-style ejaculation of foamy Leachman blood: 

And it just

keeps

gushing!

The other kiddies break out of their gingerbread prisons

and, mercifully, it's over. This has been a Cannon MovieTale.