Bookmonkey vs Hack/Slash: Day Eighteen

The Inevitable Wizard of Oz Crossover

The story of "The Wonderful Wizard of Oz" was written solely to please children of today. It aspires to being a modernized fairy tale, in which the wonderment and joy are retained and the heartaches and nightmares are left out.
– L. Frank Baum in his Introduction to The Wonderful Wizard of OZ (1900)

It’s strange to think that this was the sentiment behind the story that became the film that gave me nightmares as a child. The Wicked Witch of the West, the flying monkeys and the initial “floating head” version of the Wizard shown in the 1939 MGM motion picture each worked effectively as nightmare batter for my young mind, and as a young boy with bad eyes from the start, very familiar with lengthy and painful eye examinations, Dorothy’s question to the estheticians in the Emerald City “…Can you even dye my eyes to match my gown?” resonated with me in a way I’m certain was not the intent of the original author.

So In Hack/Slash #14: Over the Rainbow, Cassie and Vlad are attempting to track down a Slasher who is plaguing the film set of a remake of the classic 1939 film The Wizard of Oz.

Now I’ll admit that at first glance perhaps no one immediately thinks that a horror-based story is going to inevitably crossover with either the classic 1900 L. Frank Baum novel The Wonderful Wizard of OZ or the 1939 MGM film The Wizard of OZ. But to be fair, the story, and especially the MGM film have become so influential in popular culture that I’ve seen it prequelled, deconstructed and even had that deconstruction turned into a musical. It has also been referred to in everything from the popularity of the quote, to reimaginings, and even a reference in the horror film Saw II.

Also the 1985 film Return to OZ may have one of the most terrifying sequences I ever saw in a film as a child.

So adding a Slasher-twist to the story is, in my mind, nothing short of genius. The story follows both two women on the set running from the Slasher (who has possessed the productions Tin Man and speaks only in lyrics from the classic “If I Only Had a Heart”) and Cassie and Vlad as they race to the set to put an end to the Slasher himself.
IMAGE USED
Hack/Slash of Oz Alternate Cover.  Retrieved online from http://www.newkadia.com/?HackSlash_The_Series_Comic-Book-Covers=1111127128

Things I've Noticed: Prequels can be Tricky

Last night we got together with a bunch of friends and watched the 2013 fantasy film Oz the Great and Powerful and throughout the film thee were a few key things I noticed:

1) The image on both the poster and the DVD cover (pictured left) actually has nothing to do with any image in the film, there is no point where these characters all interact and certainly never while travelling down the yellow brick road.

2) Films which are designed to be both stories in their own right but also set ups for previously existing stories have an awful lot of challenges in store for them.

3) Much of what is covered in this film comes down to the hope that the Wizard of Oz's story is as interesting as Dorothy's story in the original film and that it might be able to capitalize on the success of both the Gregory Maguire book Wicked: the life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West, and the successful musical adaption of it as well.

As the movie is still relatively new (5 months as of this post), I don't want to go too deeply into the plot, but I will say that the film had quite a tough challenge if it wanted to appeal to fans of the classic 1939 MGM film, as well of those of the manay adaptations and newcomers as well.

For my money, my favourite Oz film has always been the 1985 film Return to OZ, which is both a great fantasy film and one of the scariest things I ever saw as a kid.

Genre Character of the Week: Dorothy Gale from Return to Oz

Last weekend I saw the new Alice in Wonderland movie and while I had a lot of great things to say about it, in my review I compared it in concept to the film Hook. The thing is, when I think back to movies about people returning to magical lands they visited as kids, my favourite has got to be Return to Oz, and in no small part because of its main character Dorothy Gale.

For those of you who looked at the title of my post, yes, I am specifically talking about the Dorothy from Return to Oz, and not the one from The Wizard of Oz - that movie was fun with lots of singing and dancing, but Dorothy doesn't really do very much in it: she meets a lot of friends, gets knocked out, gets kidnapped, and defeats the wicked witch by dumb luck.

Dorothy in Return to Oz (played wonderfully by Fairuza Balk) however, is full of pluck and bravery, she meets challenges, solves puzzles, takes risks, and in possibly the scariest scene I have ever seen in a Disney movie, walks down a hallway filled with 31 sleeping human heads on display (pictured right) to steal a magical powder from a case containing the original head of Queen Mombi (which is still alive, just sleeping) and ends up accidentally waking them up - seriously, writing about it right now freaks me out a little.

In a lot of ways, I view this movies Dorothy Gale as a predecessor to Neil Gaiman's Coraline, another little girl trapped in a frightening world who decides to do something about it. So to wrap up - Dorothy from Wizard of Oz, great singer. Dorothy from Return to Oz - Genre Character of the Week.