Blu-ray Review: Turgid ‘Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters’ Piles on the Gore

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CHICAGO – Witches were always my monster of choice as a child. Their façade of maternal warmth that routinely gave way to fiendish malice was both scary and oddly funny. Actresses love playing this archetype because it allows them to break all the rules followed by photogenic starlets. The fun had by everyone in a witch’s cape—from Margaret Hamilton to Angelica Huston—is timelessly infectious.

My favorite witch in cinematic history is the one played by Cloris Leachman in Len Talan’s sublime, woefully overlooked 1987 adaptation of the Grimm fairy tale, “Hansel and Gretel.” The film’s entire first half is one long, exquisite build-up to Leachman’s appearance, and it proves to be more than worth the wait. Her feigned grandmotherly kindness is hilariously kooky, as she makes a few Freudian slips about “cooking children—I mean, chicken.” But once Gretel creeps down the basement stairs to discover the old lady’s true identity, Leachman is lose-your-sleep, hide-under-the-covers terrifying.

HollywoodChicago.com Blu-ray Rating: 0.5/5.0
Blu-ray Rating: 0.5/5.0

I became sorely nostalgic for Talan’s lovely film during the prologue of Tommy Wirkola’s “Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters,” which stages a Spark Notes retread of the Grimm story beats. When the witch arrived onscreen, my heart sank. Gone was any trace of the magic or delicious mischief that made these cackling broomstick enthusiasts so appealing. Wirkola’s idea of a witch is not all that different from Zack Snyder’s idea of a zombie. They are simply grotesque mutants waiting to fall into the crosshairs of a good guy’s rifle. That’s all the witches are in this mean-spirited, blood-spattered mess. Just gruesome cardboard cut-outs propped up in order to be gunned down, “Rambo”-style. They exist solely to quench the bloodlust of an audience so desperate to blot out the horrors of reality that they’ve opted to shelter themselves within a snug cocoon of sound. No longer does character development or carefully crafted plotting seem to play any notable role in Hollywood’s trendy brand of blockbusters. All a film like this, or “Man of Steel,” is designed to give us is wall-to-wall violence performed without any feeling or consequence. The brutal degree of bloodletting in Wirkola’s film is so bereft of purpose that it suggests entertainment designed for sociopaths. These witches are shooting targets not unlike zombies, terrorists or defenseless students seated in an elementary school classroom. At one point, a doomed man stumbles into a crowded bar room and explodes, prompting a young lad to exclaim, “That was awesome!” And he’s one of the good guys.

Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was released on Blu-ray and DVD on June 11th, 2013.
Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters was released on Blu-ray and DVD on June 11th, 2013.
Photo credit: Paramount Home Entertainment

Thanks to the film’s solid international gross following its tepid reception in the states, Wirkola’s 3D bomb has already been granted a sequel, thus causing me to wonder whether stars Jeremy Renner and Gemma Arterton will have any interest in reprising their titular roles. Neither of them is all that bad here, yet neither appears all that invested either. The involvement of co-producers Will Ferrell and Adam McKay indicates that the film may have at one point been intended as a comedy, yet the film has a conspicuous lack of humor, aside from a consistently deadpan reaction to death. I wonder if Arterton enjoyed having her breasts fondled in close-up before getting beaten to a pulp by a bunch of guys who intend on raping her. Wirkola has earned praise for his 2009 Norwegian thriller about Nazi zombies, “Dead Snow,” and I can certainly see how his ultraviolent approach may have worked better with that subject matter. But in tackling a beloved fairy tale that requires some shred of atmosphere or personality, Wirkola’s soulless exercise in excess falls completely flat, even with his distracting pop-out 3D flourishes. It’s a hard-R freak show destined to excite no one over the age of 11.

“Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters” is presented in 1080p High Definition (with a 2.35:1 aspect ratio), accompanied by English, French, Spanish and Portuguese audio tracks and is available in a Blu-ray 3D/Blu-ray/DVD/digital copy/UltraViolet combo pack. The Blu-ray discs feature an Unrated cut that runs 10 minutes longer, and undoubtedly contains more blood. There are also three featurettes, one of which focuses on the film’s sole highlight, an empathetic troll created largely from old school animatronics, with a face that resembles the love child of Seth Rogen and Ludo from Jim Henson’s “Labyrinth.”

‘Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters’ is released by Paramount Home Entertainment and stars Jeremy Renner, Gemma Arterton, Famke Janssen, Pihla Viitala, Peter Stormare and Rainer Bock. It was written and directed by Tommy Wirkola. It was released on June 11th, 2013. It is rated R.

HollywoodChicago.com staff writer Matt Fagerholm

By MATT FAGERHOLM
Staff Writer
HollywoodChicago.com
matt@hollywoodchicago.com

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