There's something strangely reassuring about the fact that children in movies are routinely played by teens while teens are regularly played by jaded twentysomethings who only vaguely recall their own adolescence. Audiences for The Wizard Of Oz, for example, could take comfort in the knowledge that while the film's plucky protagonist might suffer all sorts of harrowing peril the moment the cameras stopped rolling 12-year-old Dorothy reverted back into 16-year-old Judy Garland, who could then carefully remove the duct tape from her nipples and spend the next few hours knocking back Screaming Meanies and Purple Poppers with vodka shots alongside her ever-loving entourage.
So one of the many, many disconcerting elements of 1985's Return To Oz is that its Dorothy is so transparently played by a real-live little girl, an otherworldly, preternaturally precocious little woman but an eminently traumatizable young person all the same. Oh Lordy is there a lot to be traumatized by in Return To Oz. Return To Oz has a reputation for being exceedingly dark but I still found its uncompromising creepiness bracing.
As the film begins Fairuza Balk's Dorothy is a grave little insomniac prone to spouting nonsensical jibberish about a fantastical land called "Oz" where she befriended a weak-willed lion, a Tinsman and a nightmarish sentient scarecrow. Falk is sent to a mental hospital for electro-shock therapy but a storm intercedes. Balk returns to an Oz that has devolved into a spooky ghost-town overrun by hideous creatures named "Wheelers" with wheels for hands and feet. The Wheelers' sequence is a harrowing masterpiece of sound design that betrays director Walter Murch's background as one of film's most revered editors/sonic architects. The Wheelers are such an unnerving physical and sonic presence that it seems a shame they have to open their mouths and deliver standard-issue henchmen banter.
Balk encounters a narcissistic witch who keeps a collection of disembodied heads for her own private use and display and a stone king animated by the Will Vinton studios in the best Ray Harryhausen tradition. For added Oedipal weirdness Balk's posse this time out includes a fellow for a pumpkin for a head who insists on calling Balk "mother" (paging Dr. Freud and/or Norman Bates).