Get Your Reps In: “The Witches” Casts a Spell on Clinton Street Theater

What to see at Portland’s repertory theaters.

Anjelica Houston in The Witches (1990) (IMDB)
By Chance Solem-Pfeifer

The Witches (1990)

To have grown up with ‘90s children’s films is a constant exercise in looking back and asking, “Was that actually too harrowing and/or too emotionally manipulative for kids?”

But The Witches (1990) is another level of beautifully demented cinema—pitched at children in theoretical genre terms but actually a fairy tale lensed so grotesquely that it would make Guillermo del Toro squirm.

Nicolas Roeg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The Witches stars Anjelica Houston as a coven-leading sorceress who proudly seeks to kill every child in England. The Witches is replete with traumatized orphans, Houston aiming her German accent at the cheap seats, and makeup effects that belong in GOAT goop conversation. The film screens at Clinton Street Theater as part of Violet Hex’s Cult Sensation series.

Like so many Dahl adaptations, though, its brilliance is in actually going there vis-à-vis depicting cruelty toward children and then paying it off with the kind of wish fulfillment that can only come from inheriting a chocolate factory, banishing Miss Trunchbull or spoiling a coven’s mass murder plans. Clinton, Friday, Nov. 8.

Also Playing:

5th Avenue: Kedi (2016), Nov. 8–10. Academy: Caged (1950), Nov. 8–14. Cinema 21: Sullivan’s Travels (1941), Nov. 9. Clinton: Tokyo Cowboy (2023), Nov. 9. The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), Nov. 9. Prague Nights (1969), Nov. 13. Hollywood: Hour of the Wolf (1968), Nov. 9. Song of the Sea (2014), Nov. 9 and 10. Sid and Nancy (1986), Nov. 11. Bastard Swordsman (1983), Nov. 12. Tomorrow: Napoleon Dynamite (2004), Nov. 7. Caligula: The Ultimate Cut (1979), Nov. 10.

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