Liam and Alex are two very different people, but they have two things they share: a love for film and a shoddy memory of films they saw as kids. From the shards of their fragmented nostalgia, Liam and Alex attempt to recollect the movies that affected them as young-uns before they actually see the film.
In this entry, they bravely endure the 1985 non-horror horror movie Return to Oz…
Before the Film
Liam: So when was the last time you saw Return to Oz?
Alex: I don’t actually know if I’ve even seen it all. If I have, it would have been probably at the age of 7 or 8.
I was probably 6.
While I don’t have concrete memories of watching the whole film start to finish, I do remember certain images…
I don’t think I’ve seen the film start to finish, but mainly because I was covering my eyes pretty much most of the time.
So you could appreciate, even back then, that it’s probably the scariest movie ever made.
The freaky shit factor was high. I think the thing I can recall the most is one scene near the end being really dark and scary. Let’s have a look at the poster.
I remember that scary pumpkin head thing.
Was that pumpkin head supposed to be her friend?
I hope not… And the scarecrow as well, I remember his face not moving very much. He had very scary prosthetics that didn’t move.
They look really creepy.
Yeah, and I don’t know what that little fat tin dude is but he looks like the Pringles man.
God, he does look like the Pringles man. He’s even got a tiny metal moustache.
I can tell you that there is a room full of heads that are interchangeable. Do you remember that?
No…
Theres a scary queen witch woman who can change her head I think. Because there’s a room like Futurama where there are all these floating heads. And she can take her head off and exchange it with all the heads on the wall. But I might have made that up…
That sounds way more frightening than a witch who dissolves in water. Was there as massive monster made of stone? Maybe I’m confusing that with Dark Crystal. Which also really freaked me out, by the way. Let’s read the synopsis:
“It has been six months since Dorothy has returned home from Oz and she still cannot sleep. She has been going on about imaginary places and people so much that Aunt Em takes her to see a doctor. She promptly escapes from the mental hospital and wakes up in Oz where her pet chicken, Billina, can now talk…”
She had a pet chicken?
What happened to Toto?
I guess they ate Toto.
Seems like a bit of a downgrade.
“There she meets a whole new bunch of friends and they set off to rescue the Scarecrow from the evil Nome King who has found her ruby slippers and used them to lay waste to the Emerald City and take over Oz.”
So… this King uses the ruby slippers. Does that mean he wears them?
I hope so.
I don’t remember there being a King wearing ruby slippers to take over a kingdom.
I don’t remember there being a king. Unless the King is the Queen who has taken her head off and put on a King head. And that’s why she would have female feet to fit the slippers.
That sounds awesome.
I’ll just rewrite my own story; it doesn’t matter. Actually, I remember a strong sequence of scary mental hospital things where she is definitely restrained. There are some serious mental health issues going on here.
I’m so keen to watch this now.
I also remember there being some sort of giant moose-cart-sleigh-mobile.
Moose-cart-sleigh-mobile? Like the cat bus from ‘My Neighbour Totoro’?
It goes all over the place with a giant moose head.
I can’t believe this.
[Leonie from the background says]: “What about the Wheelers…?”*
What were the Wheelers?
Google it. That sounds terrifying.
Oh Jesus!
Oh my god!
That’s horrifying!
That looks like something from the World of Wearable Arts. Oh dear – I’ve never seen that in my life probably because I’ve blocked it from my memory.
This thing is actually worse than my imagination. Let’s look at this image…
That scarecrow face is terrifying.
Yeah, it’s really scary right? I mean, straight up, looking at all of these characters – any one of them could kill you at any time.
Wait… if that’s the tin man on the left, what’s the Pringles guy?
Very early product placement?
I feel like there’s so much of this film that I’ve repressed. I hope I don’t get PTSD midway through watching this.
Well I’m sufficiently anxious about watching this.
I’m frightened.
After Watching the Film
Well, I knew ‘Return to Oz’ was going to be messed up but I had no freaking idea…
I was terrified from the opening shot pretty much. So how does it start?
Zooming in from the ominous window in deep space, Dorothy is in her bed and you hear her mother say…
It’s six months after the tornado and she hasn’t slept a wink.
Because she keeps talking about Oz.
They admitted her to the psych ward with all of the electric things, and the doctor was like…
I figured maybe a lollipop or a teddy bear…
“Let’s literally electrocute your brains and get rid of the scary dreams!”
“See these voltage dials, they’re eyeballs!”
“And this handle is the tongue”.
Another equally terrifying and revealing bit was when she was telling the doctor about how the Tin Man became the Tin Man. Do you remember that bit? That he had slowly cut off every part of his own body with an enchanted axe (including his head) and replaced himself with tin.
Yeah… I was siding with the psychiatrist at that point.
They left that little detail out in the original. Let’s not get bogged down in how difficult it would be to cut up your own body bit by bit as you are slowly replaced by tin.
Or how you would replace your own head…
When they strap her down to get her brain fried, they treat her like the biggest idiot. They get the headphones that send the electric current through her head…
And then they test it in front of her…
and her face is like…
Then a storm hits.
…the very moment they were going to electrocute her. She wakes up in Oz beside her chicken for some reason.
Her wise-cracking chicken.
They land in that desert…
The Desert of Death.
But she seems swell with it.
She seemed very switched on in regards to how to survive the deadly desert. But, she didn’t see that the rocks had eyes on them…
And that’s when the terrible memories came flooding back. Those stop-mo faces are creepy as hell, even today.
When Dorothy reaches the Emerald City, she’s surrounded by people who have been turned into stone – a horror show in itself.
Especially that ring-around-the-rosie with decapitated women.
And then it’s Wheeler time. That’s when I started having a panic attack.
Especially how they open with the “BEWARE THE WHEELERS” sign and you see one creep off to the side…
…and all you can hear is “skeeeEEEEeee”*
*very poor inaccurate wheeler impression
But I don’t know what the hell the 6-year-old me was terrified of. They weren’t scary at all. They threatened to tear them apart, but how? They have fucking wheels for hands.
They were pretty gumby. They must have struggled a lot trying to figure out how to make them actually move. You can see some of them in the background struggling really hard to stay upright.
The main one looked like Hugh Laurie on crack.
He did actually, but he was hysterical. So the Wheelers chase her…
…to a dead end but luckily there was a hole in the wall that managed to fit the key…
That she found in the chicken coup back at home because Bellina the chicken is magic or something. She then goes inside and finds Tik Tok, right?
The most powerful slow-moving wind-up guardian in the world.
His arms can extend and whirl like nothing you’ve ever seen.
And he’s absolutely proud of that fact that he’s not alive, so clearly he’s an advocate for suicide.
There was this weird mortality theme going the whole time with Tik Tok, just these little asides of… “human life is so miserable”
Isn’t that funny how Tik Tok, when he has crazy Hugh Laurie in his hands, was like…
Nobody even asked him if he was happy.
He just slips it in there. Pretty bleak.
It’s not like he ever resolves his anti-life stance either.
All the side characters have no motivation like “I want a heart, I want a brain, etc.”. They’re all totally fine with being these scary nobodies. They have zero goals.
It’s also annoying how Dorothy doesn’t just wind him up heaps the first time. She always winds him up a tiny bit and then goes “Oh no! In this incredibly important situation Tik Tok has yet again run out” Just give it a few minutes and do a good job the first time mate. So then she goes to see the Queen who is wearing spectacular clothes, has interchangeable heads and keeps a giant room full of them like I imagined.
And Dorothy’s like…
Oh yeah! She’s like…
That’s where she finds the giant pumpkin that thinks she’s his mother.
The same mother who sent the most well-mannered pumpkin out to scare a witch.
A polka-dot pumpkin.
No wonder his ass got captured.
Bellina’s all like…
That’s not even a joke.
So Dorothy grabs the ‘Life Powder’…
…in the room of heads, and they all start screaming and it’s horrible. There’s also a weird rule outlined by pumpkin head that the Queen was supposed to make him into pumpkin pie but then forgot because she changed her head. That must be really annoying. How does she remember to do anything?
You can’t find logic in a woman with interchangeable heads. Imagine how terrible the mood swings would be?
That’s probably why nobody hangs out with her. So Dorothy gets the powder of life and goes back up to the attic and sprinkles it on a whole bunch of random furniture and a moose head.
The most ad-hoc flying machine you have ever seen.
…with the feeblest of wings. I don’t understand why you would get all this heavy furniture and a giant moose head and then choose two tiny ferns as the wings. Idiot.
So they escape and fly to the Nome King’s mountain to find out what’s up.
The Nome King being a giant thing made of rock that absolutely hates chickens by the way. This is the whole reason Dorothy is in trouble, because she has brought a chicken into Oz. Which is never explained.
No, but I guess neither was the whole water-melting-witch thing in the original. So it keeps true to that.
He reveals that he got all the Emeralds, and turned everyone to stone to get them. And he’s also got her Ruby Slippers. When you suggested that the Nome King might potentially wear the slippers I thought “No way are we going to see a giant rock man wearing little slippers”. But then we see him lift his rock-robe, these dainty little feet come out…
He challenges them instead to some random guessing game.
The Nome King says something really funny as well when he goes:
“I’ve turned your Scarecrow friend into a beautiful and amusing ornament. So you have to go into this big room and touch all the things and say Oz and if you are right he will come back to life. And if not you will turn into an ornament yourself”
That guy just cannot get enough ornaments. He’s hoarder of the year. He’s got all the Emeralds from Emerald city, a shit-tonne of general ornaments and also the Ruby Slippers. Which he doesn’t need.
Well, some of the ornaments he needs, for when he feels like ordering up some hors d’oeuvres.
Like that Key-limestone pie…
…and melted silver.
Which I’m pretty sure would kill you.
It turns out the scarecrow was a green rock. Which was not beautiful or amusing.
The moose head was the first one to go in and guess. He made the joke “I should have quit this while I was A HEAD”. Absolutely no-one laughs.
But he gets it wrong so he turns into a nice plate or something.
And then Dorothy’s adopted son/pumpkinhead goes in and gets it wrong. Followed by Pringles man.
Sidenote: Pringles man is also Mark Sainsbury, maybe even more so because Mark’s moustache moves when he talks just like Tik Tok.
Then Dorothy cracks the code, the classic convoluted ornament code that every green ornament represents someone from the Emerald City. She figures it out: “I will touch all the green things”
Which was a lucky fucking guess.
Considering as well that she figured it out by shutting her eyes and walking around until she touched something. There was a lot at stake there and Dorothy was a bit stupid.
Then, all my childhood nightmares I suppressed came flooding back. The ones where the Nome King breaks through the roof of his ornament room as the massive rock creature.
And he just randomly starts yelling…
His mouth elongates in such a freaky, terrifying way. Luckily the chicken is hiding in the pumpkin man’s head at that point. So he picks up the Pumpkin-head man to eat him and I guess the chicken shits itself because an egg comes rolling out and falls into his mouth.
He has this massive rage…
He’s killed instantly, I’m assuming. Dorothy is then back in the Palace where everyone’s no longer stone people. They’re like “All hail the queen” and shit.
Dorothy is reunited with the Cowardly Lion and The Tin Man – though they couldn’t afford voice actors for either of them, which is a total jib considering they were on the poster.
I was very disappointed that they had nothing to say. I mean, the Tin Man is probably still a bit traumatized from having to cut his body into a million pieces. And even the Scarecrow… Dorothy’s just constantly like “Oh Scarecrow I love you so so much” and he has this lazy frozen grin face that doesn’t even talk. That whole thing must just be carry on from the clear sexual tension between them in the original. She then gives the blonde girl Queen her chicken, who will stay in her mirror for all eternity.
She’s like “Oh please take my chicken. She’s annoying the shit out of me.”
“She won’t shut up”
“She says jokes that aren’t jokes. I mean, she saved me and shit, accidentally though the most innocuous means but please, just keep her”
So Dorothy then ends up back in Kansas where we find some of the connections with the bad guys. The Queen being the evil woman from the mental institution and the Nome King being the psychiatrist, the only one who didn’t survive the storm. I’m surprised he didn’t choke on a eggshell.
You see the evil lady go past in a jail-carriage or whatever – why is she in a jail carriage? That didn’t make sense to me. She just survived a terrifying storm why put her in a jail carriage?
Because it was convenient to the story?
Maybe they unearthed her unorthodox electro-therapy practices.
They suddenly had a revolution in the mental health industry…
…and thought EVERYBODY MUST BE PUNISHED FOR WHAT THEY’VE DONE.
Conclusion
So did we learn anything?
My 6-year-old self was a pussy for being afraid of the Wheelers. But not so much for being afraid of the Nome King – that thing is still terrifying.
Basically, Dorothy is crazy. Women are crazy. Bitches be crazy.
Clearly she has dissociative identity disorder. And the multiple head woman has even more of a dissociative identity disorder. Are there any other women?
Does Bellina count?
No.
There was quite a telling bit at the end when they had the witch in the cage and they take her powers away. Someone turns to the crowd and says…
Which is just a normal, standard woman really.
