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Growing up, my family didn’t have much, but we had an entire wall of VHS tapes, and most of those tapes were filled with 2-3 movies each that my father painstakingly recorded from other VHS tapes or off the television. There was another wall, with about a fourth the amount of VHS tapes that was known as the “Kid’s Wall”, and in it was one of my favorite movies from my childhood: Return to Oz.
The Cult Classic of Dreams and Nightmares
To say Return to Oz is a cult classic is an understatement because for a good half of my life I couldn’t find other people who remembered it. Other kids had not heard of my favorite movie, so I stopped talking about it as some of my friends thought I made up a movie about Oz. To be fair to them, a movie about Dorthy (Fairuza Balk) getting electroshock therapy because Aunty Em (Piper Laurie) thought she was insane for talking about the land of Oz, and Dorthy making it back to Oz only to find everything was wrong with a headless witch does sound made up.
My Return to Return to Oz
As a young adult, others would reminisce about their favorite childhood movies, and still, other people would not know what I was talking about. Did their father not record this great movie off the television for them to watch?
By early adulthood, I could use the internet to locate almost any information I wanted. ALMOST. Still nothing about my grotesquely beloved Return to Oz. At this point, I no longer had a VCR or The-Wall-O’-VHS, so I started thinking maybe the movie was a fever dream of my childhood.
Finally, several years later, a friend of mine said she had also watched the movie as a child. Then, when I looked the movie up online, I found pictures of the Wheelers (dudes who had wheels for hands and feet, which is much more terrifying than I’m describing) and other people talking about how Return to Oz was nightmare fuel for them as children. VINDICATION!
Lessons Learned
This journey for me back to Return to Oz and the movie itself set me up for two paramount life lessons:
(1) It’s important to believe women. No one believed young Dorthy had been to Oz, and she is about to be forced to undergo electro-shock therapy because they do not believe her. Her aunt and doctor told her Oz didn’t exist. Similar to how Dorthy was gaslit about Oz from others, I was also gaslit when people told me Return to Oz didn’t exist.
(2) Believe in yourself. Despite being told Oz didn’t exist, Dorthy believed in herself and in her experiences. When no one else will believe in you, it is important to believe in yourself. I may have lost this important lesson along my journey to finding Return to Oz again, as I started to believe it wasn’t real.
Disturbed and Poorly Rated
Despite being one of the weirdest, nightmare-fueled movies made for children ever, there are a lot of great lessons in Return to Oz, but maybe it should be rated PG-13.
If you like dark children’s movies from the 1980’s such as The Dark Crystal, The Secret of Nimh, Labyrinth, and The NeverEnding Story, then you should watch Return to Oz.
You’ll get one of my favorite quotes (but with better context): “I have always valued my lifelessness.” –Tic-Tok, The Army of Oz.
Plus, The Nome King (AKA the bad guy) looks too good in those ruby slippers.
It’s also fun to think of Return to Oz as the precursor to The Craft, since Dorthy is played by Fairuza Balk, and she grows up to be a mean witch in The Craft. Maybe if people would have believed her, she would have grown up to be a good witch instead of a bad witch.
My biased rating because it’s my childhood classic: 9.0
NerdScore
9.0/10
Return to Oz (1985) Review
A dark, imaginative, and unsettling sequel that has aged into cult status—blurring the line between childhood fantasy and gothic nightmare.
Dorothy returns to a ruined Oz to confront sinister villains, headless witches, and stone-faced kings in this darker continuation of the classic tale.
IMDb
6.8/10
Metacritic
42/100
Rotten Tomatoes
60%
- Factory sealed DVD
- Fairuza Balk, Nicol Williamson, Jean Marsh (Actors)
- Walter Murch (Director) - Gill Dennis (Writer)
