Return to Oz (1985): 15 things that have no place in a sequel to 'The Wizard of Oz'

Yesterday I watched the movie Return to Oz for the first time. I'd heard that this was the sequel to the classic, beloved family film - perhaps the quintessential family film - The Wizard of Oz from 1939. I had also heard that the 1985 film was largely unconnected to the first one (taking more of its cues from the original L Frank Baum books) and that it maintained a cult appeal, largely because it was surprisingly scary.

In particular, I had heard that the Wheelers were pretty creepy and had apparently traumatised plenty of viewers.


And yeah, that definitely looks pretty creepy. So, having often been curious about this supposedly unsettling sequel to the most cherished, colourful and heartwarming family fim ever made, I decided to check out these Wheelers for myself.

I mean, the rest of the movie can't be as bad, right? Just look at the cover!


The result is this list:


15 things in 'Return to Oz' which are significantly more frightening than the Wheelers.

Obviously this list will spoil the movie if you haven't seen it. And trust me, seeing it will be far more fun than reading this.

So, in loosely chronological order-


1) Dorothy is taken to a psychiatric clinic.

Within the first ten minutes of the movie (which begins with suspenseful violin and the image of an expressionless, insomniac Dorothy staring hauntingly at the walls at the dead of night) Dorothy is taken to a psychiatric clinic. It's made very clear from the start that the little girl (now actually played by a little girl, just to make it worse) is mentally unstable, and that the events of the first film were probably an hallucination of some sort.

And this doesn't let-up later on. There is no point in the movie where it turns out Oz was real after all. It's left ambiguous.


2) We're off to see the....... electro-shock... therapist...

Before that opening violin has even finished, we're treated to the site of 'Auntie Em' reading a newspaper advertisment that reads, 'Announcement! Electric Healing!'
And, yeah. because of her endless ravings about ruby slippers and tin men and wicked witches (you know, our childhoods) Dorothy is literally carted-off to a turn-of-the-century psyichiatric hospital to be electro-shocked. By Auntie Em. Later in the movie, we see her being strapped into the contraption and then left alone. She escapes before the therapy can begin, thank God, but this is the movie's only mercy.


3) Dorothy, as written by Christopher Walken.

This was probably in the books, but just check out what our heroine, the sweet and kind Dorothy, tells her therapist.

The tin woodsman used to be made of flesh, like everybody else. But then he cut off his leg... he had a tin leg made, but then a witch enchanted his axe. And he kept on... cutting off all the other parts of his body, until he was all made of tin. Even his head was...

And at this point the therapist stops her, possibly in order to avoid soiling himself.


4) The sequence that launched a thousand J-Horror movies.

While we're still in the hospital, we get lots of little clues / parallels as to what will happen in Oz. You know, to set up the inevitable 'And you were there! And you!' scene at the end. There is a pumpkin, a chicken, a machine with a face. It's symmetry within the plot, setting-up the characters who are to come later - and... uh, adding weight to the implication that her adventure really is nothing but delusion. Fun for kids.

But while her doctor is explaining about the modern marvel of electric shocks, Dorothy seems to drift off... and the voice of the doctor fades... and the god-damned violin returns... and she sees the face of another girl in the mirror. Staring. Emptily. And Dorothy looks into its dead eyes... and gives the subtlest of smiles. And the violin swells... and she's interrupted again.

The rest of the scenes in the clinic are just classic horror. The mysterious girl in the mirror appears in Dorothy's room and says, 'It's Halloween soon' and it gets worse from there on. There are some very unsettling desolate, drawn-out suspense shots here, including a great one with a creaking door and a gradual zoom-in on Dorothy's empty, emotionless face.


Oh! And every now and again you hear screaming mental patients in the background.


5) A drowning child.

After the agony of the slowly-strapping-Dorothy-Gale-Into-An-Electric-Chair scene, she and the mysterious girl from the mirror manage to flee the building and escape to the storm outside. Persued as they are by the Gestapo-style matron, they immediately hurl themselves into the swelling lake nearby. After several minutes of the pair frantically trying to grab onto something in the rushing water at the dead of night, the mirror girl drops under the water and doesn't come back up.
Now later she returns, as 'Ozma of Oz'... so if we assume that Oz is real, then don't worry she's okay. But if we assume Oz is not real... and remember, the movie never gives us a straight answer... then we just watched a little girl drown.

No catchy musical numbers, yet. Still hoping.


6) Demonic voices and faces in the wall.

Dorothy wakes up, finally, in the Merry old Land of Oz, and thank God, it's colourful and pleasant. There is even whimsical music. She finds a talking chicken who tells jokes and picks from a 'lunch pail tree' - awww! And then faces start appearing on the rocks, and we cut to the same faces reappearing in a hell-like scene, distorting themselves across flickering, red, stone walls, telling an unseen character with an unhumanly deep voice that 'She has returned'. Oh.


7) Your childhood memories in ruins.

As Dorothy and the chicken sidekick set off to find any sign of life in Oz (no, honestly, that seems to be their quest) they encounter the symbolic wreckage of the yellow brick road. After another scene with Satan and the Posessed Rocks we see the heroes have reached the Emerald City... much quicker than they did last time. The city is now an eerie, ancient ruin, with no emeralds in sight, or indeed people. There are numerous chalky, semi-collapsed statues of people, some of them without heads, some cut in half at the waist, the others bearing frozen expressions of horror. The tin man and the cowardly lion are there too, having suffered the same fate. No word yet on the scarecrow or Glinda the good witch, who we are left to assume were eviscerated by Jason Voorhese. Also it's at this point that the Wheelers appear and try to kill Dorothy. She escapes and finds a new sidekick, 'Tic Toc' the comical robotic soldier who proclaims, 'I am not alive, so I cannot be sorry or happy'. More on this later.


8) Princess Mombi.

Princess Mombi is the personification of my nightmares.

The Wheelers are her private army, and she's some kind of overlord who lives alone in a giant palace playing a bouzouki, surrounded by a gallery of beautiful, female human heads. She has long ago removed her own head, and now wears those of her murder victims, which take on her personality the moment she attaches them to her neck, and otherwise wait in obedient silence with their eyes closed. Usually. After the headless body of the Princess explains the situation, she attaches a new head and announces plans to keep Dorothy a prisoner, until she is an adult and thus able to provide her with a new, pretty head.


9) Jack Pumpkinhead.

Inside Mombi's dungeon, Dorothy and her freakish, unlovable cohorts meet the latest and most horrific of that number - Jack Pumpkinhead. This is a tall, gangly man with a carved pumpkin for a head, a distorted sense of identity and the voice of a serial killer, specifically Norman Bates. Seriously, he sounds just like Norman Bates! And better yet, he believes Dorothy is his mother. For me, this was the height of the movie's horrors - just after seeing Mombi's living decapitation gallery, to suddenly see Jack crouching down toward a small girl and whispering, 'May I call you Mom?' sent me right over the edge. And he keeps calling her that all the way through the movie.


10) The Wizard of Oz 2: Dead By Dawn.

As they flee the Princess (don't get me stated on that - it involves a headless, animatronic woman jutting out of her bed) the heroes enlist the help of the 'gump' - a trophy deer head which they have reanimated against his will in order to help them. They connect the gump to a sofa with improvised wings. Quite rightly, the Frankensteinian monster asks them, 'What am I?' Dorothy replies, 'You're just a thing.' Quite. Tic-Toc then says they should keep flying until dawn. They won't make it 'til dawn.

This scene ends, brilliantly, with the whispered line, 'Good-night, mom...'


11) The Nome King.


The Nome King is not a gnome, and hardly a King since he seems to have no subjects beyond Mombi, her Wheelers and the claymation faces in the rocks. Because everyone else in Oz is dead. He is the one responsible for the current, horrible fate of the land, as he explains when he introduces himself to the heroes. Because the Emerald City was built with emeralds, which he apparently owns, being a spirit of the rocks... he views the city's construction as theft, and he does a fairly good job of convincing us of the cold, just logic of his coup.
Also, his face becomes more and more human-looking with every life he takes. And he has the scarecrow held prisoner in Limbo. And he has stolen the ruby slippers. And he is wearing them.


12) He chose... poorly.

After taking them prisoner and inviting them to drink hot liquid silver, the Nome King forces our heroes into a challenge - they must view his 'trophy room', in which every trophy is the distilled soul of a citizen of Oz, and work out which one holds what remains of the Scarecrow. If they choose incorrectly, they become his latest trophies. And all but Dorothy choose incorrectly. The comical robot Tic-Toc actually cries before the stress of the situation causes his body to break and shut-down. Before he makes his choice he also says, 'I have always valued my lifelessness.'
I have always. Valued. My lifelessness.


13) Honour or Madness?

Before making her choose her ornament, the Nome King offers Dorothy another tough decision:

Nome: You don't have to go down there. I could use the ruby slippers and send you home. And when you get back, you will never think of Oz again.
Dorothy: But what about my friends?
N: Forget about them. You can't help them now. (pause) There's... no place... like home!!

And with this, the last remnant of good feeling about The Wizard of Oz is eradicated forever.


14) The Death of the Nome King.

By confusing means, Dorothy, Jack and the other abominations manage to beat the Nome King at his own game, whereupon he ceases to toy with them and transforms into a massive, red stone monster. The fires of hell surrounding them, they watch helplessly as he laughs hysterically in his demon voice and slowly lowers Jack into his enormous, gaping jaws.


Jack survives and the King dies, horribly. And this is the end of things, here. The rest of the film is relatively non-threatening. Dorothy restores the murdered peoples of Oz to life and in thanks, the shell-shocked Tin Man and Lion wordlessly hug her. She wakes-up to find that the mental clinic has burned down, killing the doctor with the shock therapy machine. Y...ay?

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So there you have it! I hope I've brightened-up the Wheelers' reputation, if only by comparison. Sure, at one point they corner Dorothy in a tunnel whilst cackling and threatening to 'cut her into shreds', but as you've seen - this is nothing compared to the everyday waking nightmares within the wonderful, charming, Technicolor world of Oz.

And also-


15 - This.

This.


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Return to Oz is highy, highly recommended, but not for unaccompanied children.