Not exactly what I remembered. Return to Oz.
Memory is a funny thing. I remember a sequel to The Wizard of Oz from long ago that involved insane asylums and Dorothy’s family coming to Oz. I remember it being creepy and frightening This property does not seem to exist as a single entity. Did I half-imagine or dream it? In looking for that I came across a different entity, one I am pretty sure I watched at some point and perhaps went into the blender of the horror/dark Oz of my imagination.
And so we come to Return to Oz, my entry for the Deja Boo project. But was I scared, or more creeped out and confused? Read on. Return to Oz is a 1985 movie starring (in her first role) Fairuza Balk as Dorothy. It also features Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh and Piper Laurie.
We start six months after the events of The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy has been unable to sleep, and seems to have been telling her family that the events in Oz were real, much to the distress of her Aunt and Uncle. Desperate to help her, they bring her to Dr. J. B. Worley (Williamson), who promises to be able to cure Dorothy by the power of electricity. This is 1899, and the fact that Worley’s establishment has electric lightbulbs and fixtures is a great wonder in rural Kansas. Jean Marsh plays Nurse Wilson, his right-hand woman. While Dorothy herself does not see the danger or the framing, any intelligent viewer can see, from the color of the walls to the layout, that this is a sanitarium/asylum of some kind. When they strap Dorothy to a gurney to bring her for her electrical treatment, all pretenses are lifted.
During an electrical storm that wrecks the building, Dorothy escapes along with a strange new friend whose provenance remains unclear for most of the movie, but winds up washed up at the edge of the deadly desert. While viewers of The Wizard of Oz are unfamiliar with the Deadly Desert, the Dorothy of Return to Oz seems to be more drawn from the novel rather than the movie, since she knows all about the Deadly Desert and why one should not touch it. This Dorothy in Return to Oz is in general much more genre savvy than the Dorothy of The Wizard of Oz. It doesn’t always help her, but she is far less helpless than she appears.
Dorothy, and her chicken Bellina, who also came over from Earth, travel the Yellow Brick Road, meet some allies and friends, and tangle with some nasty customers. The Wheelers, part man, part bike¹, are an impractical but frightening enemy. Worse is Mombi, who looks like Nurse Wilson, a witch who can change heads, and has different memories in each head. Mombi decides to try and capture Dorothy to become a future head. Dorothy encounters the mysterious girl from the sanitarium again, and with some magic powder and some planning, Dorothy and her little army escape to head to the mountain of the Nome King. The Nome King holds the Scarecrow, King of Oz, and is responsible for all that has happened.
At the Nome King’s palace, this wizard king taunts and plays with Dorothy and company, but some quick thinking and luck gets Dorothy and her friends the upper hand. For the final confrontation, we learn that chicken eggs are poison to Nomes, and thanks to Bellina, the Nome King is defeated, Mombi is captured and all is restored to the realm. The mysterious girl turns out to be the rightful queen of Oz, Ozma, and she too, is restored to her place. Dorothy is restored home (Bellina, being a hero, decides to stay in Oz), and we find out that in the real world, the asylum burned down, the doctor has died and we see, for reasons never explained, Nurse Wilson imprisoned in a cart and being driven away. We last saw Mombi in Oz stripped of her powers and in the cage, so Oz-Earth logic strikes again.
It’s not the property I imagined, but it seems like it went hard into the blender. It’s a kid’s movie, but darker than most kids movies, especially today. It does canonize and expand on the screen visuals and ideas from the original movie, and the practical effects of 1985, while not spectacular, service the story well enough. Return to Oz did not frighten me, I am more than 45 years too old for that. It would have frightened a younger me. It unsettled me, then, clearly, to go into the blender of my weird mis-memory of a Oz story, and it unsettles me now. It’s not exactly light entertainment to have Dorothy in a sanitarium/asylum, a wrecked Oz, people turned into ornaments and the threat of harvesting Dorothy’s head.
I do think that while it’s interesting, for adult viewers, it might be one solely for Oz completionists, who want to see and consume all things Oz. And seeing actors like Williamson and Marsh chew up the screen can be fun.
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POSTED BY: Paul Weimer. Ubiquitous in Shadow, but I'm just this guy, you know? @princejvstin.
¹ Shades of Jace and the Wheeled Warriors!
