Review – Return from Witch Mountain

Disney must have hoped for box office success with this witless nonsense based on the popularity of the first Witch Mountain picture and maybe a little boost from the Close Encounters mania. Though the original wasn’t exactly Citizen Kane, the witless script and unenthusiastic performances by the cast doom this effort from the start. Parking their UFO in the middle of the Rose Bowl (which apparently nobody notices), the kids from the first one take a vacation in the big city. They’re swiftly separated when the bad guys kidnap boy and girl falls in with a quartet of street-gang-wannabe nerd brats. The experience is transformed from ordinary Disney 70s live action crappy to genuinely painful by the total squandering of the talents of both Christopher Lee as a mad scientist and Bette Davis as a dotty old villain who absolutely will not shut up about how much she’d like to lay her hands on some money. If you have to do a Witch Mountain picture (and mind you, I said “if”), just stick with number one. See if desperate