Finally Got Up My Nerve to Watch This and Really Liked It

Wanting something fairly scary for Halloween, I finally got up my nerve to watch Return to Oz and really liked it. For 39 years I was afraid to watch this movie because I thought the hospital scene was going to be much worse than it actually was. I had gotten the idea it somehow involved needles which it does not. Fairuza Balk was wonderful as Dorothy, different than Judy Garland and in some ways better. Dorothy in the books is described as being a little girl, that is no more than 12 and likely several years younger. The special effects were great. I'm guessing in the days before CGI most or all had to be practical effects but I couldn't guess how many things were done. Certain of the characters in Oz, by their shape and the way they moved, didn't seem as if they could possibly be actors in costume. This made the Scarecrow and Tin Man somewhat less relatable than the characters in the 1939 film but somehow more bizarre and fantasy like. I especially liked Jack Pumpkinhead. Instead of Toto, who appears at the beginning and end, Dorothy is accompanied by a chicken named Billina. The movie was just scary enough without being too scary. It is much better than the 1939 film in that it makes Oz real. A complaint of fans of the books is that the 1939 film makes it a dream. I'd say nothing in Return to Oz was any scarier than the flying monkeys in the 1939 film and this movie should be fine for kids to watch.