Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (aka Hansel & Gretel: The 420 Witch), 2013
Directed by Duane Journey
Starring Molly C. Quinn, Lara Flynn Boyle, Michael Welch, Andrew James Allen, Bianca Saad, Lochlyn Munro and Yancy Butler
SYNOPSIS:
A brother and sister battle a witch who lures teenagers into her suburban home with her special blend of marijuana where she then proceeds to kill and eat them to maintain her youth and beauty.
Stoner comedies can only really go one of two ways – they’re either pleasantly surprising like Dude, Where’s My Car? or they can be utter rubbish. Like Hansel & Gretel Get Baked.
Gretel’s idiot stoner boyfriend goes to pick up a new strain of weed that they both enjoy while she bakes up some gingerbread men for them to eat due to their munchies. He goes to this little old ladies house (played by Lara Flynn Boyle) who punishes him for taking a bite of her gingerbread house. Worried sick that her boyfriend is now missing, Gretel and her brother Hansel try to track him down.
The first, and major, problem with Hansel & Gretel Get Baked (promoted in the UK as Hansel & Gretel: The 420 Witch) is that it simply isn’t funny enough. It treads a fine line between being a comedy movie and a straight up horror, and it actually dips more towards the latter but then tries so hard to make its audience laugh. Like a lot of movies of its ilk, it’s not funny enough to be a comedy and it’s not scary enough to be a horror. It just becomes 90 minutes of stuff happening to characters you don’t care about.
The movie also seems to have a blantent disregard for its characters, no matter how much development (or lack thereof) they’re given. Characters that are given a certain amount of depth are the ones that get bumped off the quickest, leaving you with a bunch of sideline characters who’ve had around 3 lines up until this point, which means you care even less about the movie and whether or not anyone survives.
Molly C. Quinn (currently featuring in We’re The Millers) is perfectly serviceable as Gretel and probably gives the most convincing performance of the main cast with everyone else trying to do the best with what they’re given. But it’s Lara Flynn Boyle who appears to be having the most fun as the wicked witch, which is at least commendable. She channels her distant performance from Men in Black II and has the most laughs of the movie (what little there are).
However, the most surprising thing about Hansel & Gretel Get Baked is just how little it has to do with the source material. Outside of the character names, a witch and a trail of breadcrumbs (in this case, Skittles), the movie bears no resemblance to the classic fairy tale and while this is not a massive issue, it does beg the question why they even bothered calling it a Hansel & Gretel movie. They could have called the characters any other names and it would have been the same movie. Perhaps they’d have been better off going the Wes Craven’s New Nightmare route and used it as plot device rather than the main idea.
Worse still, Hansel doesn’t even smoke weed – which makes the title even more redundant.
Nitpicking aside, Hansel & Gretel Get Baked is still a really dull, by the numbers unfunny comedy. It fails at almost everything it tries to do and it just feels like a giant waste of time. No real effort was put in by the filmmakers which in turn makes the actors look bad and the movie fell apart at its inception. It will play to a certain audience who will probably like it, but it will never become anyone’s new favourite movie.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ / Movie: ★
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of Flickering Myth’s Podcast Network. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
