Something Wicked This Way Comes is a Disney production of the novel by Ray Bradbury, screenwritten by Bradbury, and starring Jonathan Pryce, Jason Robards, Vidal Peterson, Shawn Carson, Diane Ladd, Royal Dano, Mary Grace Canfield, Pam Grier, and Bruce M. Fisher.
Will Halloway (Peterson) and Jim Nightshade (Shawn Carson) are two lads in middle America, just vibin'. Will has a strained relationship with his father (Robards), because his dad is a little older and has a bad heart and he's sad a lot. Jim's father isn't around at all, however.
Anyway, one evening the Dark Carnival rolls up with all the Juggalos...well, no, run by the sinister Mr. Dark (Pryce), and starts sucking in members of the community by letting them give in to their vices and then absorbing them into the carnival. Jim and Will witness some of this magical evil and catch the attention of Dark and his monstrous henchman Cooger (Fisher), and eventually learn that the carnival has been preying on the area for centuries. Will's father comes through with the solution - they feed on misery, so joy and life repel them. Mr. Dark gets stuck on his magical carousel that ages (or de-ages, depending on the direction) a rider, turns to bones and is carried away by one of his henchmen, and the whole carnival is sucked up into a tornado. The end!
So, I love Bradbury, and this is...not a great interpretation of his book. That's not because of what's in the movie or not in the movie, it's just that it's a studio production and no one (except maybe Bradbury himself) had any particular vision for what the movie is really about. The studio forced reshoots (some nearly a year after shooting had wrapped, which when you're talking about child actors makes a bit of a difference - during the mirror maze and spider attack scenes, I legitimately wasn't sure if it was the same actor playing Will because he'd shot up like a beansprout and he was clearly wearing a wig), scrapped the entire score and replaced it with one by James Horner, changed some effects around, and it makes the whole thing really slapdash. Actually, one bit of trivia I learned was that Vidal Peterson is actually dark-haired and Shawn Carson is actually blond, so rather than have them play the characters that are meant to have those hair colors, they bleached and dyed their hair, respectively.
But quite apart from producers pissing the proverbial soup, there's just a lot about the movie that doesn't work. With all due respect to Jason Robards, he doesn't read as sad so much as dour and severe, and at the end when he's supposed to revive Jim and beat the carnival with love and joy and affection, it doesn't work because he doesn't read as loving or joyful or affectionate. The two kid actors, Shawn Carson especially, do pretty well (though I think the best child actor is Brendan Klinger played Cooger after he's been de-aged), and the supporting cast is OK, though it suffers from the 80s allergy to casting anybody but doughy white people (the only person of color in the cast is Pam Grier as the Dust Witch, and she doesn't get much to do).
Something Wicked This Way Comes, like a lot of Bradbury's work, is hard to film because you need the filmmakers to understand the themes as well as the text, but even if you've got the author himself writing the screenplay it doesn't matter if the studio comes in at the last minute and chops it all to pieces. I'd love to see a new interpretation of this novel directed by someone who knows how to work with these themes. Del Toro would crush it. I suggest Mark Rylance as Charles Halloway.
My Grade: D+
Rewatch Value: Low
Next up: Song of the Sea
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