Return to Oz

Walter Murch's Return to Oz can stand on its own as a creative children's entertainment, much closer, in fact, to the spirit of the Baum books than the wildly overrated Wizard.

Murch's approach has its own somber integrity, which can sink into the pedestrian and rise into the magical.

It respects the intelligence of its audience while providing fresh thrills to keep even the most fidgety moppet awake and glued to the screen.

Return to Oz keeps one eye pretty faithfully on reproducing the background and adventures of L. Frank Baum's Kansas-raised girleen while swivelling the other to incorporate some extremely special, often splendid effects.

The normally dazzling photographer David Watkin shoots the film in pasty, overcast colours, as if this return to Oz was strictly off-season like a visit to Brighton in November.

The film succumbs too much to the special effects fidgets.

"Return to Oz" might be dismissed as a sanitized gore show, were writer-director Murch not so diabolically good at being nasty.

On the whole, a perhaps surprisingly worthy successor to The Wizard of Oz, mercifully avoiding the Disney stock-in-trade of whimsy to stick to much the same vein of sturdily colourful fantasy as the earlier film.

There's no wizard in this film -- before or behind the camera.

There are genuine moments of terror that are worthy of the Disney animated classics of old.