Back to the Seventies

I waited many years to own Escape To Witch Mountain. I can’t remember where I first saw it but I don’t think it was in a cinema. It feels like the kind of thing I might have watched projected onto a temporary screen in a Torquay hotel rec room. I know I saw The Love Bug one Sunday afternoon at the synagogue’s adjoining community centre, so it might have been there. Either way, it was 30 years ago and I loved it.

Tony and Tia are brother and sister arriving at the orphanage after their foster parents die. From the start we’re pretty sure that they are unusual. Tia can talk to animals and Tony can hear Tia’s voice inside his head. He can make things move just by looking at them and concentrating hard. Sometimes Tony uses his harmonica to help him concentrate, but he’s a pretty high-functioning telekinetic all the same, without the added burden of puberty and pigs’ blood.

Aristotle Bolt, the gorgeously named bad guy, is played by Ray Milland and if you think he looked grizzled after his Lost Weekend, he must have been on a decade long bender before they wheeled him out for this performance. At the start we see Bolt consulting an assortment of financial mystics and gurus looking for a way to turn his gazillions into fantillions. Imagine his good fortune when his number one henchperson Lucas Deranian (generously underplayed by 70s psycho Donald Pleasance) stumbles across our two psychically enhanced cherubs.

All the while Tony and Tia are trying to uncover the secrets of their origin by following the map that was hidden in Tia’s star case (What? You mean you DON’T have a star case?). Once the kids realize that Bolt is a nogoodnik, they begin their escape and I’ll give you three guesses where they’re trying to escape to.

The special effects are lo-tech but satisfying and my kids have had as much fun with this as with Harry Potter. I have a feeling that it may turn out that with movies the story IS important after all.

Three years later the kids returned in Return From Witch Mountain in which our mentalist minors are terrorized by Christopher Lee and Bette Davis.

Unlike the Region 1 Special Edition, the Region 2 version that I purchased comes with absolutely no special features, no commentary track and barely any subtitles. Fortunately this is made up for by the affordable price charged by Amazon.co.uk of £5.97.

One final piece of trivia. Kim Richards who played Tia has a sister called Kathy who married hotel heir Rick Hilton. That means Tia grew up to be Paris and Nicky's auntie. I guess all that pretending to communicate with less intelligent mammals must have come in handy.