The Grand High Witch is killing it. but seriously, she's terrible. From the start on, with the weird Chris Rock voice-over, this remake goes wrong wherever it can wrong. The acting is stiff, the focus is hardly on all the other witches, the CGI is not good. Even the housekeeping cart seems to come from the CGI box. Positive thing: Octavia Spencer is doing her best to be a genuine grandmother, and she succeeds, but that's about it. OK, yes, I am a fan of the 1990 movie. Even though it wasn't as close to the original story, I really can't believe Roald Dahl would recognize his book in this mess. The first movie was gorgeous in it's authenticity. It has folklore, it has an edge, it has a heart. This is Hollywood factory work and seems to want to be much more than it can deliver. It made me miss much more than the purple glow in the witches eyes. It made me want to just throw up like a witch who smells children. I'm not saying you shouldn't watch it. I am sure that an entire generation who never grew up with the original will disagree, but to me, this is like cursing in a church. It's horrible.

Robert Zemeckis with the help of Guillermo del Toro has gone for a grotesque take on Roald Dahl's The Witches.

The book has been transplanted to Alabama 1968. A young boy (Jahzir Bruno) goes to live with his Grandma (Octavia Spencer) after the death of his parents in a car accident. He gets a pet mouse to cheer him up.

One day in a store he is lured by a witch who offers him a bar of chocolate. However his grandma calls out for him before any damage is done.

His grandmother tells him when she was a child her friend was turned into a chicken by a witch. The witches seem to target black kids as no one seems to notice when they go missing.

The boy is taken to a hotel to stay by the seaside by his grandmother. Unfortunately the witches are having a convention where the Grand High Witch (Anne Hathaway) plans to turn all the children into mice.

Blessed with a narration from Chris Rock, a camp performance from Anne Hathaway and expensive CGI special effects. This adaptation still struggles compared to Nicolas Roeg's version from 1990.

This can be shown by the waste of Stanley Tucci's hotel manager character. At times The Witches wants to be a dark Disneyfied kids movie with a nod and a wink to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. This explains why a fat boy lured with bars of chocolate is transformed into a mouse because of his greed.

Not a bad adaptation of the Roald Dahl book, but when the Nic Roeg film exists then this one doesn't need to. The setting is swapped to America, worse luck, and things feel different for the first third. Once we move to the hotel, however, this becomes a lesser, almost shot-for-shot reprise of the Roeg movie but of a much lesser quality; the only notable thing is that the original book ending is kept. The kids are okay here, the CGI is average, but the adult actors fail to give convincing performances, and Anne Hathaway in particular is hammily horrible.