"Escape To Witch Mountain" on Netflix and "Beyond Witch Mountain" on Youtube

 

      I've spent my long weekend doing what any normal male in his thirties could be expected to do: reacquainting myself with Disney's "Witch Mountain" franchise. As a kid I was a fan of these flicks, but man, was the subtlety lost on me. These are the darkest film's the House of Mouse ever made, showing us the world through the eye's of kid's in need of mental health care.

     "Escape to Witch Mountain" is the story of Tony (Ike Eisenmann) and Tia (Kim Richards), two orphan's suffering from PTSD. They lost both their parents in a shipwreck and recently their two foster parents have died. In order to cope with their pain, the two children have concocted the delusion that they have psychic abilities. Tom suffers from auditory hallucinations of his sister's voice, obsessively playing a harmonica to drown them out, and Tia has violent flashback's to the accident that took her parents' life. An unofficial prequel depicting the children's life with their birth parents, titled "Devil Dog: The Hound of Hell", was made a few years later.

     The children are taken out of the orphanage they are housed at by their millionaire uncle (Ray Milland), who provides them the home of their dreams. "Aristotle Bolt" is the word salad name the kid's make up for him. Paranoia soon takes over and the children come to view Bolt as an evil, cartoonish villain out to exploit their imagined powers for profit.

     They run away from the mansion and soon meet up with drug dealing drifter Jason O'Day, played by Eddie Albert. O'Day roams the California coast in his camper filled with cocaine disguised in sacks labeled "Flour". Pursued by the children's family and the police, the kidnapper and his victims develop the shared psychosis that the children are in fact "alien's" from another planet who must get back to "Witch Mountain", where other "alien's" live. After ditching the cocaine from the camper during a high speed chase reminiscent of director Hough's "Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry", the descent into madness continues as O'Day and the kid's believe themselves to be "flying". The picture concludes as they experience a mass hallucination of a spaceship, come to take the children back to their people. Pretty intense stuff.

    Don't even get me started on "Return From Witch Mountain" (not on streaming), made a few years later. Tia and Tony wander a burnt out Los Angeles wasteland; she a member of a violent street gang and he a terrorist threatening to blow up a nuclear plant. John Hough powerfully envisions the world of these damaged children, rivaling his work in "Legend of Hell House".

     "Beyond Witch Mountain" takes place between the "Escape" and "Return". At the start, the senile drifter "Uncle Bene" (Noah Beery Jr.) the children (now played by Tracey Gold and Andy Freeman) have been living with dies. It's unclear whether or not it's from a gunshot wound suffered earlier at the hands of the men their real uncle, "Aristotle Bolt" (Efrem Zimbalist Jr.),  has hired to rescue them. Before he dies, Benet convinces the children they must abduct a student from the nearby special needs school, who in his dementia addled state he believes to be his grandson.

     They arrive at Jason O'Day's door, filthy and starving. O'Day has been hiding out at his "brother's" cabin, surviving on fish from a nearby stream. Greg (Eric Aved), the child who Tony and Tia are after, sits uncommunicative in a hospital room, a prisoner of his own mind. A ransom is offered to O'Day by Tia and Tony's uncle, but playing hardball, he holds out. Desperately, in an effort to find his niece and nephew Bolt administers a truth serum. O'Day and the kids eventually make a violent escape and later use forged documents to steal Greg from the hospital where Dr. Molina (Stephanie Blackmore) is trying to get him the help he needs. The poor lad is convinced by Tony and Tia that he too is an "alien" and aided by O'Day, they deliver him to "Witch Mountain" aka the homeless encampment where they have been living. As the story ends, they head off down the road to gather more mentally unstable people to join their growing cult.

     Anticipating what David Lynch would do with the character of Donna Hayward in "Fire Walk With Me", while also one-upping it, all the parts in "Beyond Witch Mountain" are recast from the previous movies, with the exception of Eddie Albert. This leads one to wonder if perhaps it's all a hysterical dream of O'Day's fevered mind as he sits alone in the cabin. Though shot and released third, it's actually the second picture, further mirroring the characters' fractured psyche's

     In his autobiography "The Acres Aren't Always Greener On The Other Side", Eddie Albert called his involvement with these pictures, "The most important work of my life." Sobering portrait's of mental illness, the "Witch Mountain" (taken from an archaic term for an unsettled mind) franchise represents the artistic pinnacle of the Walt Disney company, rivaled only by Bob Crane's harrowing, semi-autobiographical portrait of one man's midlife crisis: "Superdad".