No, I’m not over exaggerating just to get clicks. The plot is full of holes so big you could drive a freight train through them. It contradicts itself, repeatedly. There are no character arcs for any of the characters. It tries to elevate message over story, but fails to deliver either a coherent message or a logical story. And, worst of all, it sloppily tries to redeem the child eating, soul sucking, mind raping, slave mongering, tyrannical, sociopathic, insane, Devil worshipping, power mad Sanderson sisters in the absolutely worst way possible. In short, Hocus Pocus 2 is everything wrong with modern storytelling. It ends up doing far more damage than good and ends up glorifying Evil and diminishing Righteousness. Here I explain all these reasons in detail and why you shouldn’t waste your time on this movie.
Plot and Story
I won’t spend my time fully sequential recounting the story here. You can read a reasonable synopsis here. But I will be talking about the events of the movie in detail throughout and there will be major spoilers. Consider yourself forewarned.
The plot of Hocus Pocus 2 is nonsensical. There are clearly two very different movies taking place at the same time, in the same film, and neither of them are developed enough to be interesting or good.
In Movie A you have an apologia for the Sanderson sisters. They’re not evil. They’re simply misunderstood. They became witches because the people of Salem were mean to them on inifred’s birthday (which Puritans didn’t even celebrate) and they were forced to do what was necessary to survive. In this movie the sisters are raised from the dead by another black flame candle, go on some wacky adventures where no one is really hurt, and are ultimately redeemed by the power of sisterly love. Their final death is met in a glorious burst of golden glowing lights and triumphal music, all movie cues telling you they’re saved and perhaps even going to Heaven.
In this movie, magic is a superpower you’re born with, like the ability to shoot lasers from your eyes (or fingertips in this movie’s case), that manifests when you’re sixteen (for some unknown and unexplained reaosn) and you grow stronger through the power of friendship and love. In this movie friendship is magic. Well, unless you’re Winifred Sanderson, whose magical powers manifested when she was fourteen and her sisters even younger than her. When the young witch Becca manifests her powers the movie literally has a character tell us to ignore it because the movie is so poorly written that it cannot explain its own concepts. Of course having powers based on biology makes needing a magical living spell book to learn magical spells from redundant, especially since you can apparently cast magic without any spells at all, as we see our younger heroines repeatedly do. This of course makes the entire obsession with the spell book or even incantations as seen in this movie and the first one completely meaningless. If all you have to do is wave your hands and say what you want to happen to occur until it does, no rhyming, spells, or magical book necessary, then why don’t the Sanderson sisters ever just do that in either movie?
Yet, at the same time you don’t need any magic at all in order to create magical items. The decidedly non-magical and very mundane Gilbert, who now owns the old Sanderson cabin (well preserved for being over 300 years at this point!) and who is a Sanderson sisters obsessive, creates a black flame candle, somehow. The process is never explained. Nor is it ever explained how he, without any magical powers at all, can manage to replicate a spell so powerful it can raise the dead to full life. In the first movie the candle was entirely unique and based on the magic the Sanderson sisters had put into it. In this one, Gilbert, without any powers, creates two. And at least one is necessary to raise the sisters from the dead. But not really? Because later on this movie explicitly and repeatedly tells us that magical items don’t matter. This is shown when Gilbert substitutes a stuffed spider for a mummified one in a spell and using the head of Billy Butcherson, Winifred’s former “lover,” being used as the necessary head of a former lover in a spell despite it being made clear that they never loved each other and only ever kissed once. Yet the spell still works without a hitch.
So, which is it? Do magical items matter or are they irrelevant?
In this movie there are no consequences for your actions and everything is forgiven if you have an “Aww, shucks,” attitude and didn’t mean to hurt anyone or anything. Your intentions, not your outcomes, are all that matter. Gilbert gets away with raising the Sandersons from the dead and terrorizing thousands with a mere two second apology. Apparently we are supposed to forgive the aforementioned child eating, soul sucking, mind raping, slave mongering, tyrannical, sociopathic, torturing, insane, Devil worshipping evils of the Sandersons simply because some people were mean to them when they were teens. Some men were once mean to them so that makes it okay for them to eat children. Similarly, it doesn’t matter if the spell book is bound in living human flesh and powered by Hell. You can do evil magic from it as long as you intend to do well.
That is Movie A.
Movie B, faint as its embers are, is a very different movie.
In Movie B, Winifred Sanderson is a monster from childhood. She stomps through Salem in a flashback, charging through everyone in her way, knocking things over, and being rude and cruel to everyone she comes across. From the very start her relationship with her sisters is based on possessive domination, not love, as she demands they feed her ego by telling her how attractive she is, how smart she is, and she is better than everyone else. Their relationship is firmly established on power and control, not friendship, sisterhood, or love. Likewise, the Sandersons are unrepentant monsters, even as teens when they have no problem eating children in order to stay young and beautiful. The first thing they do when they get powers from their spell book? Go and set fire to a the house of Salem’s minister, a house presumably full of innocent people since Puritan ministers married and had children, all in order to get back at one person.
In this movie, magic is not a superpower. It is a skill. And it has rules you must follow. Gilbert still doesn’t have any magical powers, but he does have a great deal of knowledge on the subject. This explains how he was able to make a black flame candle. Because in order to do magic what you need is knowledge of how to do it, not an in born superpower. Likewise, the heroines have been training in magic since they did their first magical spell when they were five. Thus, when the main character begins manifesting magical powers in the movie it isn’t a surprise and it isn’t her superpowers developing when she gets old enough as if she were a mutant and hoping to get on the X-Men. Her magic manifests because she has spent over a decade of her life at this point studying it under Gilbert’s tutelage. Likewise, for her friends who have been doing magic, or at least practicing magical incantations, since they were five as well. As a result, in this movie magical items in spells actually matter. Without them the black flame candle can’t be made, the curse on the stairs in the “dungeon” couldn’t have been broken, and the salt circle wouldn’t repel black magic.
In this movie the Sanderson sisters love nothing more than sucking out the souls of children. There are even repeated references to the sisters joyfully committing cannibalism. But they’re bad at all of it because they’re absolute morons. They repeatedly get tricked by children and do foolish things like drink lotion, eat facial masks, and apparently can’t tell the difference between clear water and berry juice.. They’re definitely stupid, but also definitely evil. They do the same dancing mind rape trick as they did in the first one and have no problem enslaving others to their will. They spend a great deal of the movie hunting down the spell book and then just inexplicably decide that instead of doing the much easier task of kidnapping a baby and draining it of its life force instead they will do a much more complicated spell to increase their magical power levels. To do this they must kidnap the daughter of the descendant of the Puritan minister who threw them out of Salem long before. Lucky for them the family apparently never moved in over three centuries. The movie also never explains how this new spell would alter the black flame candle’s spell or prolong their lives. Having more power doesn’t mean living longer, after all. And they never bother to read the introduction to the spell that would have warned them about its cost. The consequences are that they die, destroyed by their own stupidity and hubris.
As you can imagine, the plot hole are numerous. Magic requires spells. Until it doesn’t. Spells require rhyming. Until they don’t. The spell book is a necessity. Until it isn’t and all you need to do is wave your hands around. Items are necessary for complex magical spells. Until they aren’t and there is no difference between a toy spider and a real one. Magic is a discipline you learn by study. Until it is a power you are simply born with. The characters are smart. Until they’re absolute morons. The Sandersons are powerful, nearly all powerful. Until they get whipped by a teenager who literally just developed her powers. Winifred is just misunderstood and loves her sisters. Until she repeatedly beats them, terrorizes them, and outright says they’re nothing but meaningless leeches. The Sandersons are evil, Devil worshipping monsters. Until it turns out they’re just mutants manifesting their superpowers. The Sandersons are devious and cunning. Until they’re complete buffoons tricked by the most obvious things that require no knowledge about the modern world.
This movie is just chock full of contradictory nonsense and can’t get out of its own way. It is a disaster in storytelling. But that isn’t even the worst part. The worst part is how it glorifies evil.
The Sanderson sisters are irredeemable. They’re monsters in the worst sense. This could have been a movie where the righteous magic of the younger girls (a concept set up in the the original Hocus Pocus with a reference to white witches, here white meaning symbolically good and not skin color) defeats the vile infernalist magics of the Sanderson sisters thanks to the girls being guided by Gilbert’s superior knowledge of magic thanks to a lifelong study of the subject. Instead the movie tries to sloppily redeem the Sandersons in the last act of the movie with Winifred’s whining over the deaths of her sisters, caused by their own arrogance, hubris, and mad lust for power. I’m supposed to feel sorry that literal child eating Devil worshippers who learn their magic from a demon spell book bound in living human flesh and draw their power from their master Satan get their comeuppance and are defeated? What a garbage ending and terrible message.
What Characters?
I’ve already mentioned how the Sanderson sisters are treated in a very contradictory manner by the movie. I won’t re-tread that here. Instead I want to focus on our heroine witches and Gilbert. Unfortunately, like a lot of more serious horror movies, in this movie the villains are the true characters that matter because and everyone else dances around them. Fangoria has a great article about why this happens, but it comes down to two basic things: the villains are more merchandisable and they are the ones who reoccur in every movie. As a result, the supposedly main characters end up being bland, stupid, and comedic, either blundering their way to victory or getting saved by a deus ex machina (such as conveniently discovering you’re this movie’s version of the Scarlet Witch.)
The three friends who have been doing magic rituals are Becca, Izzy, and their estranged friend Cassie. When we first meet them, Becca is turning sixteen that very day and her and Izzy are planning on doing their yearly ritual in the nearby Salem forest. Cassie is hosting a party for her stupid jock boyfriend and other kids in school. After Gilbert, a self-proclaimed expert in magical studies who the girls have been going to and learning from for many years now, gives them a candle Becca and Izzy go into the woods and accidentally raise the Sanderson sisters. Apparently just any black flame candle will bring them back. This is the inciting event of the movie, now the girls have to deal with the Sanderson sisters.
The problem is that at no time do any of these characters develop as a result of these events. After the Sandersons go after Cassie and Becca and Izzy go to stop her it is revealed that the whole reason the girls are fighting is because Cassie has a boyfriend now. Seriously. Cassie had been dating her jock boyfriend and wanting to spend time with him, even bringing him along when she went to hang out with her friends. Instead of explaining that they miss hanging out with her, Becca and Izzy, supposedly Cassie’s friend since they were all five, just her decide to freeze her out of their lives one day, never telling her why and what their problem is. They never stop to think maybe there is something to Mike that Cassie knows about and they don’t and getting to know him might be good for them.
After all, Mike and Cassie have been together for at least four months (the freeze out) and an unknown amount of time before which was long enough for Izzy and Becca to get annoyed with him. Conservatively, Cassie and mike have probably been together for at least five months. Instead, living purely by high school tropes (which this movie constantly uses instead of actual plot and character development) they turn against Cassie, exile her from their friend group, and treat her as if she is the enemy. Then they have the gall to get upset when she doesn’t invite them to her party. The whole thing is childish, not in a teens-aren’t-adults way, but in a stupid-so-the-plot-can-happen way. Literally two minutes of dialogue in the movie fixes all their problems and that is it. This is the closest these girls come to having anything resembling either character arcs or personal stories. Otherwise they are just moveable set pieces to shuffle around to set up the Sanderson sisters.
Gilbert’s story is equally terrible. We are introduced to Gilbert as someone who is highly intelligent and well-informed about the occult. He dresses well, speaks well, can command an audience, and runs his own successful business. Using his advanced occult knowledge he manages to recreate the black flame candle from scratch. That is, he creates a magical item capable of raising the dead without any magical powers of his own! But as soon as the Sanderson sisters show up he goes from competent and intelligent to stupid and cowardly lackey. Somehow he is capable of raising the dead but can’t find an actual spider corpse? He can raise the dead but freaks out at Billy Butcherson still being a zombie? He spends the rest of the movie as a joke, running around like a chicken with his head cut off. And only after he gathers everything the witches need to complete the spell that supposedly will make them unstoppable does he even think of standing up to them. He starts off a strong Black character with tons of knowledge and a distinct personality. By the end he is the stereotypical minstrel character running around making an idiot of himself for the amusement of the audience.
What Message?
Jude Dry’s description of Hocus Pocus 2 as a, “teen feminist morality play” is undoubtedly exactly what this movie is supposed to be about. The Sandersons were mistreated when young, so that justifies them being monsters. The heroines are a trio of younger female witches (well one witch and her friends). This is all supposed to clearly be about Girl Power(TM) and witches are supposed to be the ultimate form of that. But when you strip that thin veneer away the whole whole thing falls apart.
I’ve already harped enough on the stupid and sloppy attempts made by this movie to try and redeem literal child eating Devil worshippers like the Sandersons. Here I will confine myself to saying that telling women that it doesn’t matter who they are or what they do degrades not only their womanhood, but their humanity. The idea that the unrepentant Sandersons are redeemable just because Winifred lost ownership of her sisters is degrading to women altogether.
For a movie focus so much on feminism, all of the younger female characters in this movie are absolutely morons. Not only is their fight instigated by the presence of a boy, something that seems anti-feminist if anything, but the heroines are all too stupid to have a two minute conversation of the topic that would solve the problem. How is it a feminist message to suggest teen girls are inexplicably incapable of discussing dating with their friends and too immature to have a serious two minute discussion about how they miss one another? I can’t believe a woman would write, direct, or produce such a message. That is how bad it is as a “feminist” message. If anything, it seems like the kind of pointless, mindless vindictive cattiness that a male writer would author based on his misconceptions of what it means to be a teenage girl.
Where is Cassie’s mother? Her father is working on Halloween, or at least out trying to glad hand for votes. But the mother, who would presumably stop her daughter from having a wild party in the first place? Where is she? Is she sick? Visiting relatives? Out helping her husband? Is she dead? No one knows! Not one word is ever mentioned of her in any way. And why not? Because the party literally exists as nothing more than a plot device for the girls to be angry at each other over. The movie didn’t even give the mother, potentially one of the most important female roles in the film, any screen time or even the decency of an explanation for why she is off screen. She isn’t important enough to exist and would just get in the way of the dumb girls fighting over a dumb party and a dumb boy. That is what this movie thinks of women.
Then there is the man-hating of it all. And make no mistake. This movie hates men.
Every single male in this movie is an imbecile of the highest caliber. In the opening prologue, the Puritan minister, living in a 17th century New England colony, loses his mind and goes absolutely berserk when a spider climbs on him. Really? The idea that anyone living in the 17th century would freak out over a spider is ridiculous. Spider would have been common everywhere during his entire life, especially in the middle of a rugged colony at the edge of civilization. This stupidity transfers to his present day descendant who despite being mayor of Salem is still an idiot whose one obsession is getting a caramel apple from a favorite vendor. His inability to get one sends him spiraling into a tirade and petulant pouting. So much so that he doesn’t even notice when his daughter disappears altogether for hours on end after discovering her with bizarre and strange acting strangers (the Sanderson sisters.).
I’ve already discussed how the movie turns what should have been an educated, successful, strong Black male character in Gilbert into a buffoon. It is but one more example of how this movie hates the men in it.
Then there is Mike, the jock boyfriend. He is a literal idiot. Everything he says or does is wrong and the movie endlessly derides him and makes fun of him for his stupidity. Which is ironic since Izzy lectures Mike when he says he never made fun of her of Becca with Izzy telling him that pointing out how someone is, such as calling a witch a witch, different is making fun of them. First of all, that is nonsense. Stating facts about someone is not making fun of them. Also, why would someone who has practiced magical rituals since childhood, who is a witch, get angry at someone for saying she is a witch? This is another message that falls completely flat. But it is actually worse than that because the movie constantly makes fun of Mike for being different himself, of being ignorant and maybe even a little dumb. Even his girlfriend Cassie seems to barely be able to tolerate him and she never defends him or supports him. To get only a little metatextual, if it is wrong to simply point out how someone is different, what does it say about the writers that they not only did that with Mike but used it as a way to justify causing him grief and pain?
The message of this movie seems to be that women don’t need men, that all men are stupid, and that all that matters are other women. Is that really a feminist message? Does it even reflect reality?
It seems to me that the original Hocus Pocus had a much better feminist message. Yes, Max and Allie, the male and female leads, ended up romantically together, a classic trope many feminists dislike. But more importantly, we see repeated examples of healthy relationships in the movie. Max’s mother and father seem to deeply love one another, enjoy spending time together, and respect each other as equals. Max in turn respects Allie as a person, never takes advantage of her, and never talks down to her. She in turn does the same for him. Instead of one saving the other or being smarter than the other, they work together as equals to solve the problem of the Sanderson sisters. The idea of men and women working together as equals with equal capability is a far more feminist and realistic message than the one in Hocus Pocus 2.
Final Thoughts
I’m sure you’re still thinking, “Surely, not everything about the movie is bad, even if you’re right about everything you’ve said.” And that might be technically true, after all the cat CGI is better in this movie than the last. But none of the stuff that this movie isn’t terrible at matters. Good costuming and good CGI do not make a good movie. Don’t watch Hocus Pocus 2. Doing so won’t help you in any way. It isn’t a good film my any stretch of the imagination. Not only does it fail as a piece of cinema, it fails as a piece of propaganda. For all of its own flaws, the first Hocus Pocus is the far superior movie, in every way. Just go watch it again. The story is better. The message is better. The characters are better. The plot is better. The morality is better. The music is better. The jokes are funnier. Leave Hocus Pocus 2 in the dustbin of history. Your life will be far better for doing so.