Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return Review

I feel that it is completely necessary to preface this review with a little tidbit. If you are shy or are uncomfortable with copious amounts of cursing, you should probably avoid this review. I make no guarantees that I won't curse given the quality of today's movie. Also, I if I do get... angry in the middle of this review, I apologize. I just want to make sure everyone is prepared for what's about to happen. Never before has it been so justifiable for me to curse and rage ever so freely about a movie. Let's get right down to business then. Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return is bad. Hell, I think it's awful. It's a waste of time and a waste of money, and I feel that so much effort and talent was wasted on this sorry excuse for a movie. And that's me being polite. Hence the preface.


Normally this would be the point where I would give a brief little plot summary of the movie, but I'm not going to because frankly, who the hell cares? I know I sure don't. Dorothy goes back to Oz, meets new friends, and tries to save Oz again from an evil jester. There, that's all you need to know. On paper, it sounds... decent. Plenty of Oz adaptations exist where Dorothy meets a whole bunch of new friends to go on adventures with and is usually a staple of the series. The hero will journey with three critters that have odd quirks to them. Hell, that's why we got a couch as a critter in Return to Oz. Here we get the majesty of Wiser the Owl, a fatass owl who never shuts up, a China Princess who is completely narcissistic and only cares about herself, and Marshall Mallow, a walking marshmallow soldier that is socially awkward. We are just going to have a ball here!

As of right now, you may be asking yourself "Jesse you Oz The Great and Powerful liking bastard, what's wrong with that? So far it doesn't seem like there's anything wrong with this movie!" And you know what, you're right. I haven't said anything about this movie that justifies my hate towards it. Let me rectify that! Right off the bat, the animation is awful. Everyone in the movie looks too cartoonish for their own good. They all look like Plasticine dolls and have no real defining features to them. All of the characters look misshapen, and the women in particular look awful, with waists so thin that you're pinky finger is wider than they are. The designs of each character just look too bizarre and disproportional to the point where no one looks natural at all. They look stiff, lifeless, and outright bad.

All of these characters need to die!

 And if looking horrible wasn't bad enough, they actually have to talk too. Now to be fair, the voice cast that they assembled for this movie is, to be frank, one of the best all star casts I've seen in a while. Dan Aykroyd, Kelsey Grammer, Jim Belushi, Oliver Platt, Bernadette Peters, Lea Michele, Hugh Dancy, Martin Short, Megan Hilty, and Captain Picard himself, Patrick Stewart. It's an amazing cast! So what does this movie do? IT WASTES ALL OF THEM WITH A HORRIBLE SCRIPT!!! Every character tries to come off as "funny" with their dialogue and quirks, but none of them have any charm to them, and the script is just plain awful. All of the jokes that are written into the script are explained five seconds later because the audience is too dumb to understand these jokes.

Take a scene in a candy courthouse, where Dorothy and her friends are on trial for eating candy. Mind you the people in this town are made of candy so... yeah Dorothy and her friends have essentially eaten people and cannibalized their insides. So while on trial, they are entitled to have a jury by their peeps. And who's in the jury box? Peeps! As in the candy. They starting peeping, and Dorothy asks what they mean. Her attorney starts to make peeping noises as well to explain to her that they're quite literally saying "peep peep peep". Peep. Peep. PEEP. The joke has been set on fire, burned with salt, and taken to the bottom of a ditch to be buried with rocks and used syringes. That's how dead the joke is in this movie, and that's how all of the jokes are. ALL of them.

Nothing in this script is remotely good. There's no subtlety to the characters, and there certainly isn't any heart in this movie. It just seems like it doesn't deserve to exist, yet at the same time the thought entered my head of "Why does this movie exist?" And that's a legitimate question. Who wanted this movie? Who was clamoring for a movie that's a sequel to the immediate events of The Wizard of Oz? If no one wanted it, why was it made? It's an independently made movie, so someone thought that this was a good idea, but who thought it would be? Why did this movie get a wide release and not a straight to DVD release? Why am I still talking about a movie where a morbidly obese owl is accused of eating candy, which we have established are alive, 498 times, effectively accused of murder nearly 500 times???

I would make a Joker joke, but the Joker doesn't deserve to be mentioned in
the same breath as this movie!

No one is likable, and everyone is an idiot to add onto the list of fails this movie accomplishes. In particular, the Jester, the main villain of the movie, is the most pathetic excuse for a villain that I've ever seen. He tries to come off as intimidating and a mix of the Joker and Hades, but instead is just pathetic to watch. He usually gets his ass kicked by everyone, including his own servants, and the closest thing he does to actually being effective is screwing around with everyone in small ways. In his first big act of villainy against Dorothy, he has the gall and the nerve to do an unspeakable act against her. He changes the signs in the candy world that say "Do Not Eat The Candy" to "Do Eat The Candy"! ZOMG THIS GUY IZ A GENIUS! HE CHANGED SIGNS! HE IS THE TRUE TERROR OF OZ LIKE NO ONE HAS EVER SEEN BEFORE! ALL GLORY TO THE HYPNO-TOAD!

He's just awful in every regard. When he's not doing petty acts of villainy, he's whining and trying to sound tough and frightening, but instead coming off like a twelve year old trying to sound tough in front of a ten year old. Wow, you're so tough! You've starting developing testicles! Congratulations! It's even worse when at the end of the movie he shows up in complete Joker regalia with red lips, a white face, and faded makeup. I'm sorry, but you're not Heath Ledger. Get out of here right this instant.

And a special mention goes out to Glinda for being the worst character in the whole movie. Bernadette Peters completely phones it in, trust me I understand why, but that still doesn't excuse how bored she sounds. She sounds like she's about to fall asleep at any moment and doesn't give two shits about what's happening to Oz. "Oh, are you about to take over Oz and rains destruction down upon every citizen? No, stop you fiend... don't do that... you'll be sooooooooooorryyyyyyyyyyyyyy..." Plus her design is what really makes me cringe about the character designs. She doesn't look like she's even able to breathe, let alone walk around. The weight of her upper body should probably snap her waist like it was made of saltine crackers.

This just looks... wrong... Glinds looks misshapen...

Oh but I haven't even gotten to the best part yet. Do you want to know what it is? Are you sure? DO you really want to know? I think you're gonna like it? Okay! Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return... is a musical! It's... a musical. They sing... and the best part is the guy who wrote the songs. They were written by a man named Bryan Adams? Who is he? Why, he made this song... and it's one of the worst songs of the 90's... dare I even say of all time... and he made the songs for this movie... You know, I may have dissed Frozen for how annoyingly over popular and over hyped "Let It Go" was, but at least it was still the solid foundation for a phenomenon. It was a great song from a decent musical, though it came from a great movie. All of the songs here though? Completely forgettable. None of the songs have any staying power, they last only two minutes max each, they all suck, and none of them are any good. The only was that was passable was sung by Lea Michele and Hugh Dancy, but only because both of them are trained singers and because I was fantasizing about Hugh Dancy singing to Hannibal as Will Graham.

Oh if Hannibal crossed over with this movie I would be so happy. Mads Mickelson walking around, killing citizens of Oz in grisly and spectacular ways. He could make their corpses into puppets! Oh wait, the Jester already does that, and it's creepy as shit while sucking at the same time. How do you do that? How do you take a creepy moment and suck out all of the energy and life behind it???

Marajuana leaves? Even if I smoked all of the pot in the world, the resulting
movie wouldn't be this bad.

FUCK THIS MOVIE! I don't think it needed to be said as bluntly as that, but this movie is AWFUL. I know a lot of people hated Oz: The Great and Powerful because of James Franco, but I would have loved to dine on more James Franco. Please, give me more Alien in this movie! I want more Harry Osbourne! If having James Franco involved assures some level of quality to it, then I'll take an entire movie of him smoking pot and halluncinating this whole thing. If this movie is just James Franco being high on the set of Oz: The Great and Powerful, at least it could be hilarious to watch.

This movie is such a waste of good talent. When you take Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean actor, and make hi into a talking tree, you have failed as a movie! The songs don't work, the actors don't work, the animation is abysmal, the characters look bizarre, none of the jokes land, the script is idiotic, the villain is worthless, and I just plain hate this movie. This is garbage! This is worthless! I'd be more livid if I wasn't so blatantly shocked at how awful this would be. I mean, I knew it would be bad, but not THIS bad. This is Jar-Jar Binks levels of bad. This is Disney straight to DVD bad. No, not even that, cause at least Disney has some quality to it. This is on the same level as those Tinker Bell movies that go straight to DVD, and SO HELP ME GOD IF YOU DARE QUALIFY THAT WITH "Oh, but what about the Tom Hiddleston Tinker Bell movie?" I WILL TAKE THIS MOVIE AND RAM IT SO FAR UP YOUR ASS THAT THE PHYSICAL PAIN WILL REMIND YOU TO NEVER MAKE THAT STATEMENT AGAIN, AND THEN I WILL FORCE YOU TO WATCH THE MOVIE TO DRIVE THE LESSON HOME!

This is a 1 out of 5! I reserve this ranking for the worst of the worst, and this is by far one of the worst pieces of trash I have ever seen in the history of this blog! Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return is pure, unadulterated, garbage and deserves all of the hatred it is getting. BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!

                

Here, have a clip of Hannibal. It's not much, but at least it's much better than this movie ever will be.