FROM "RETURN TO OZ"
"Return to OZ" is one of those underrated gems that just gets better and better every single time I see it. From the lovable characters; to its special effects; right down to its scary as hell moments that come from the film's villain the Nome King and his minions. And rather than talking about him first, I'm going to go the opposite direction and talk about the villains that serve him, and then talk about him since we don't see him until the third act of the film.
The film's secondary antagonist that's allied with the Nome
King is the witch Mombi, who is now under the position of Princess once Oz has
been taken over by him. Before we meet her, we hear threatening things about
her from her henchmen, and an off-screen Nome King, but when we do finally see
her, she turns out to be lovely and pleasant as she just sits in her beautiful
palace playing a mandolin. And just as you begin to wonder what's so evil about
her, since she seems so harmless, we are then exposed to her collection of heads
that she's taken from the former residents of OZ, and uses them to change her
appearance to make herself look beautiful, and with the famous Dorothy Gale in
her grasp, she locks her up in a tower until she becomes a woman so that she
can take her head, and put it into her collection. The concept of the character
alone and what she tends to do to Dorothy is already disturbing enough, but the
film takes extra steps to scare us for when Dorothy tries to steal a magic
bottle that's next to her real head, which her actions accidentally causes the witch's wicked face to wake-up and angrily scream out her name (though how
does she know who Dorothy is if she never wore that head in her presence...who
cares it’s a scary scene), that also awakens her headless body that comes after
Dorothy, and her other separate screaming heads. I may have not
grown-up with this movie, but I do consider this scene to be the scariest scene in
the movie that will disturb if not traumatize you whether you are young or old.
And when she's not chasing after Dorothy for her head, she sits around taunting
the real princess of OZ who she enchanted into the mirror (and real
world...I guess).
Assisting Mombi in carrying out her plans to capture Dorothy, are henchmen who are half clown and half bicycle called Wheelers. Now I'm
going to admit that I didn't really find these creatures as scary as many other
fans of the movie have felt. Their designs are cool and at times freaky,
but for the most part of the film I just found them to be comical. They all run
away after being hit by a robot with a lunch pale, and when one of them gets
captured as he's begging to be spared while acting cuckoo is just silly and
pathetic. Truth be told I found myself feeling bad for them, rather than I did
fearing them since they are shown being constantly abused by Mombi, and being forced to serve her. Not to mention the fact that a few them died
in the deadly desert when they were chasing after Dorothy at the demand of
their master, where any living thing that touches the sand will turn into sand
(which more than likely means that half of the sand in the deadly desert are
the remains from the creatures and people who have set foot on it). These guys
are crazy and may probably already be the bullies or thugs of OZ when they
weren't under Mombi and the Nome King's control, but if one thing's for sure,
they're definitely not serving Mombi out of their own free will. The moment
where I pity these creatures the most is when they act as a horse-drawn
carriage as Mombi violently whips them in a hell-like environment, acting insane
with her messy hair and wide-eyed expressions as she tells them to move faster.
However, even though I don't find them to be as scary as everybody
else makes them out to be, that doesn't mean that I didn't find them horrofying at at least
one point during the film, because I did, and that's the scene when we first
meet them! Before we see them, we see graffiti on the walls of the ruins of OZ
that reads "Beware the Wheelers", as we hear the screeching of their
wheels and would occasionally catch tiny glimpses of them. And when they do show-up, we at first think that their angry stoned faces are their actual faces, only to
realize that those faces are really their helmets and that their actual faces
are very clown-like, as they then skate after Dorothy laughing,
making strange animal-like noises to signal each other, and threaten to tare
her into pieces with their wheels and throw her remains into the deadly desert as
she's trapped by them. That is truly a scary introduction that gets more unsettling the
more I see it, when I originally thought that it was just weird the first time
I watched and reviewed the film. But aside from that, I still don't think
they're as terrifying as everybody else has built them up to be.
Even though Mombi and her Wheelers assist the Nome King in
ruling OZ, he does have minions of his own who are all made out of stone, just
like him. These creatures can appear on any piece of rock and stone that lies
on the surface of OZ, where they usually keep an eye on Dorothy and her friends, and report back to their master. The scenes when the Nome Messenger reports to
the king truly look like something from my nightmares when I was a kid. That
creepy voice (voiced by the actor playing the lead Wheeler) and the
demonic-face on the walls of the Nome King's lair with the red hot fires reflecting
on it as we hear his deep voice echo, just makes me shiver.
With him and Mombi ruling OZ with his minions, what exactly
did they do to it? Well they replaced Munchkinland
with a dark forest, destroyed the yellow-brick road, stole all the emeralds
from Emerald city, imprisoned the Scarecrow, and turned all of the inhabits of
OZ to stone (including the Lion and the Tin-Man) as Mombi took a few of their
heads. I mentioned earlier that Mombi helped the Nome King achieve it by
imprisoning the princess Ozma, but it was mostly done by the Nome King when he
got a hold of the ruby slipper when they fell off of Dorothy's feet as she was
flying back home after she clicked her heels. So to make things more depressing
of what's become of the land of OZ, it was mainly Dorothy's fault for her
carelessness of possessing the slippers.
Just like how we first met Mombi, instead of the Nome King looking
scary and acting ruthless when we first see his stone face on the mountains of
OZ, he instead friendly greets Dorothy and her friends, asking what he can do
to make her visit happy. And when Dorothy claims that he stole the emeralds,
and demands the Scarecrow to be released and the emeralds to be restored back
to the city, he just laughs and lies to her by claiming that the emeralds were
already his, and that he suspected that the Scarecrow stole them since he runs
OZ, while he's taking her on a surreal tour through his lair and collection of
emeralds. All throughout Dorothy's encounter with him until the climax, he
hardly ever shouts or loses his cool in front of her, he always remains
calm and graceful, by trying to cheer-up a down and out Dorothy over the loss
of her friend after turning him into an ornament as "revenge" by
giving her the chance to find him;
offers her and her friends some tasty refreshments; and is willing to take
Dorothy back home and erase her memory of OZ if she's not willing to find the
Scarecrow.
And why would she not want to find the Scarecrow you may
wonder (for those who don't mind spoilers), because he has them play a guessing
game to find the Scarecrow by touching an ornament in his treasure room and
saying the word OZ, and if all three guesses are wrong, the person who fails to guess correctly will turn into an ornament themselves. When Dorothy protests against the
challenge claiming that it's not fair and that he didn't tell them what the
risk was going to be, he humbly tells her that she didn't ask, and if she were going to risk
something than it is fair, and if they don't play his little game he'll throw
them into his fiery furnace. This whole sequence is drenching with complete
suspense from start to finish. Even when I know what happens in the end, I
still find myself completely sucked in to the tension from the atmosphere, and how
much I care about the characters and relate to what they must be feeling about
being forced to take this challenge. The cool thing about this scene is every
time when a character turns into an ornament, the Nome King's appearance keep's
altering because when no one remembers OZ, he will become completely human (I
don't know why, especially when he has the ruby slippers, but it's a fantasy so
whatever). He goes from being a face on the stone walls of his lair, to later
on having a rock body that are both carried by glorious use of Claymation that
still holds up to this day for how much it fits the character, to looking
nearly human where's he's played by the actor voicing the character (Nicol
Williamson) that's supported by fantastic make-up.
But out of all the forms that the Nome King takes, the image
that had many of us crapping ourselves is when he becomes a rock monster at the
end! When Dorothy and the gang pass the challenge that they weren't supposed to
succeed in, in a state of anger and frustration, the treasure room gets
destroyed, the flames in his lair grow bigger and brighter, the music becomes
intense, his minions become more monstrous looking as they begin to surround their
prisoners, and the Nome King becomes bigger and scarier than he has ever been
in the movie. And instead of just sending Dorothy away like he thought about
doing before, he decides to devour them all. This is clearly where the Nome
King's lair literally turns into OZ's interpretation of hell, for how demonic
and infested with flames it is. But when the chicken accidentally drops an
egg inside his mouth, he and the rest of the rock minions slowly turn into
skulls since egg's are poisonous to Nomes.
And I have to say that even though the Wicked Witch of the West's death
will always be iconic and one of the classic deaths in film history, I admire that this
film actually hint's that a chicken is somehow deadly to Nome's, rather than it
happening out of the blue and revealed at the last minute, and when we find out
why, it still comes off as a surprise, and dare I say a more intense demise.
Just like in the classic OZ film that everybody has seen or
heard of, where the majority of the characters that Dorothy meets are fictional
counterparts to the people that she's known in Kansas, this film does pretty much
the same thing, mainly regarding the villains. The Nome King's real-life
counterpart is a jolly friendly doctor, who is obsessed with "Electrical
Healing" feeling that it can help a person since he believes that the brain act like machines, as he tries this method on people with a machine that
resembles a face. But as pleasant as his presence is, and persuading his method
would sound for people at the time, it in reality horribly damaged his patients
so much that he would keep them locked in the cellar of his clinic, where you
can hear their screams echo through the dark halls. A few of the qualities and
characteristics that both the doctor and the Nome King have in common is they're both liars who act nice and seem to want to help Dorothy (both claiming that
they know what will "cheer” her up, which are actually horrible
solutions), but in reality they're just talking down to her, and are only trying
to harm her for their own personal gain, than actually doing good for her. Even as
going as far as claiming that the electric shock won't hurt her, when he knows that
it indeed will after trying it on many other patients. They both are also seen
smoking a pipe to emphasize on their class. And if the machine that he has by
the way looks familiar to any of you who've seen the film, that's because it's
supposed to be the real-life counterpart for the robot Tik-Tok, since it has a
face and needs to be wand-up.
Mombi's real-life counterpart is a nurse who serves the doctor just as faithfully as her fictional counterpart does, who is so
strict and emotionless as she wears a dark and gothic looking dress, that I
swear that she makes Nurse Ratched from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" look sweet and professional. To be perfectly honest, even though I
enjoy Jean Marsh's performance as Mombi when she's wearing her real head for how wildly cruel and wicked she
is, I actually found her scarier as the nurse mainly because she doesn't ham
it up as much as she does as Mombi. If anything, I get more chills out of her for how straight-faced and no-nonsense she is. Some of the other things that resemble
her OZ version of herself that you are more likely to miss is that she keeps
Dorothy locked in a room, that interestingly enough has the same number as the
number for the cabinet where Mombi keep's her original head. Also when either
form catches Dorothy escaping after having her locked up, they both react to
her attempt by exclaiming "So"! And just like how Mombi has a gang of
Wheelers assisting her to help out the Nome King, she has unfriendly looking
nurses that are always shown pushing the stretchers (the one that pushes the
one that Dorothy is on, is the same actor who plays the lead Wheeler). You may
even notice that just like how Mombi's palace at first look pretty and
decorative to looking old and dusty when Dorothy is being taken the away, the
same can be said exactly about the clinic that the Doctor runs.
What's especially interesting about how both forms relate to
each other is that their fates are very similar. The Nome King loses his kingdom and
dies, as the doctor loses his clinic because of lightning and dies as he tries
to save his machines. And Mombi gets imprisoned and is disenchanted from her magic,
as the nurse goes to jail for assisting the doctor in damaging the minds of
innocent people. The thing that I find head scratching about the movie but not
in a negative way at all is it was never clear if OZ was a dream or not. In the
original classic that the film is NOT a sequel too, but borrows a few elements
from it however, is it was clear that Dorothy's journey was a dream since she
was knocked unconscious during the storm, and in the end of her trip she wakes up in her bed. But
here, it's a little more puzzling. She gets taken away by the current in the
river, and wakes-up on land when she comes back from OZ, but who was the girl
that saved her from being electrocuted? We never see her again after she frees
Dorothy, nor find out who she was in reality. Was she just a figment of
Dorothy's imagination and that she probably freed herself somehow? Ok, but what
are the chances that the nurse and doctor would share a similar fate that her
dreams had? It's a little too coincidental for a dream if you ask me. Could it
possibly be that Dorothy really did get shock therapy, and everything starting
from the lights going out to when she was awake, is her being delusional as she's
wandering around not knowing what's going on and seeing stuff that isn't there,
or looking at things that are currently happening through a different reality?
The answer to me at least remains a mystery, and I haven't seen the film enough
times to give you a complete analysis of it, but needless to say that the
mystery of it is one of the reasons why fans of the film love coming back to
it. I know I certainly do.
It’s surprising that Disney can make a good OZ film and
be enchanting, but also legitimately horrifying for any age. And it all comes
from crazy bicycle men, a Witch who takes people’s heads, and rock monsters,
that are all lead by the biggest monster of them all who destroyed a fantasy world
that we all wish to visit. And before we enter all of this, we witness Dorothy face a doctor who believes in the horrible process of shock therapy, and cold and
bitter nurses in a dark clinic full of locked people who have gone insane. If you
forgot that “there’s no place like home”, don’t worry the Nome King and all who
serve him will greatly remind you by scaring the living day-lights out of you!
"There's noooo place like home"
-The Nome King
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