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Return from Witch Mountain (1978)

Several things became clear to me while recently watching Race to Witch Mountain.

1) The Rock is an affable personality able to make fun of himself without seeming ridiculous;

2)Carla Gugino, aside from being an actress of considerable range, is also becoming increasingly hotter as she gets older.

3)Ever since Walt Disney began partnering with Jerry Bruckheimer, their films are getting more violent and frenetic. Bruckheimer is in no way involved with RTWM but the amount of ‘splosions and gunplay and sheer kinetic motion in the film suggests a training bra of sorts for young viewers to work their way up to Bad Boys II. RTWM may have been rated PG, but there was more action in any three minutes than in most of Fast and Furious. This is mildly disconcerting.

Many reviews brought up Escape to and Return from Witch Mountain, the 1970s predecessors to Race, as having some kind of nostalgic hold on a generation that might now be bringing their children to theaters for a new installment. I vouch for Escape, with kindly old Eddie Albert playing the gruff widower in the large motor home protecting two orphans/aliens. The effects are as cheesy now as they were then, but it has a lot of heart, and a kind of creepy scene where a coat rack appears to come to life and attack a deputy. Return from Witch Mountain, in spite of my attachment to it as a child, is not only a pointless sequel but a boring and preachy one as well.

As the title suggests, telepathically gifted teens Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and Tia (Kim Richards) have returned to Earth for a vacation of some sorts, but the trip winds up like a cross between a lesser After School special and a galactic variation on rumspringa. Within ten minutes back on our planet, Tony has been kidnapped by an evil scientist (Christopher Lee) and his eccentric patron (Bette Davis) and forced to steal gold.. Tia falls in with a band of truants/would-be gang who wind up being her saviors. The finale hinges on the potential nuclear meltdown of Los Angeles. And everything is wrapped up with a sledge-hammer sentiment akin to "stay in school and be smart like the wonder twins." The film plays its plot out with a poker face (Lee and Davis don't attempt to add any levels of camp) which means that even a ten minute sequence where an incapacitated Tia psychically sends a goat off through the streets of L.A. to find her new friends and bring them back to rescue her, even this comes off as only slightly incredulous, instead of jaw-droppingly absurd.

What Return to Witch Mountain had that made this all bearable was Kim Richards. Or more specifically Kim Richards in that garishly red outfit she wears for the duration of the film. A color so vibrant and unnatural its half-life may not be measurable. I realized not so long ago that Richards qualifies as the first crush I ever had. Even when I was too young to understand what the hell that might mean, or to comprehend why looking at her made me feel all funny. I now attempt to balance this with the latter-day knowledge that she is Paris and Nicky Hilton's aunt, and to see her in the new film (she and Eisenmann have small parts) is to confirm that yes she does come from that gene pool. And how weird is it to even type those words?

F. Scott Fitzgerald famously observed that American lives have no second acts. Perhaps, but in one form or another, we have sequels and second chapters in endless abundance.

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