Plot
While visiting his grandmother Helga (Mai Zetterling) with his parents in Norway, Luke Eveshim (Jasen Fisher) learns about witches: demonic females who destroy children. Helga tells Luke the story of an old friend of hers who was taken by a witch and ended up locked in a painting for the rest of her life.
After Luke's parents are killed in a car crash, Helga takes him under her wing and they move to England. While playing in his treehouse, Luke is approached by a woman who offers him a snake and a bar of chocolate, but her purple eyes give her away as a witch and Luke refuses. On Luke's birthday, Helga falls ill due to diabetes and the doctor recommends a trip to the seaside to improve her health. Helga and Luke stay at the Excelsior Hotel by the beach but, unknown to either of them, a convention of witches is gathering for their annual meeting with the Grand High Witch (Anjelica Houston), going by the name Eva Ernst and posing as the chairwoman of the RSPCC (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children). Luke meets and befriends a boy, Bruno Jenkins (Charlie Potter), but immediately gets on the bad side of the hotel manager, Mr. Stringer (Rowan Atkinson), when one of the charladies (and Stringer's secret girlfriend) catches Luke with his pet mice. Stringer begrudgingly allows Luke to keep the mice as long as they are kept in their cage. Luke later sneaks into an assembly hall and hides in a corner to train his mice in secret.
The witches enter the hall and prepare for a meeting, removing their wigs and shoes, revealing their square-ended feet. The Grand High Witch herself goes on stage and removes her wig and mask, revealing her true, monstrous form. After chiding the witches for their lack of progress in eliminating the children of England, the Grand High Witch presents them with her latest creation, a magic potion meant to turn the drinker into a mouse. To demonstrate, she lures Bruno into the assembly hall with an earlier promise of chocolate after feeding him a chocolate bar which was laden with the formula. To Luke's horror and the audience's delight, Bruno turns into a mouse and flees, leaving behind his clothes. As the Grand High Witch declares the meeting over and the witches prepare to leave, one witch, a hotel chamber maid, smells Luke's scent and he is found. After a long chase, the witches catch Luke and force him to ingest an entire bottle of the formula, turning him into a mouse instantly. Luke barely manages to escape as the witches stomp on his clothes to kill him, but he evades them and reunites with Bruno. The two make their way to Helga's room and tell her the story. Knowing of the Grand High Witch's plan, Luke devises a plan to get a bottle of the formula and douse the witches' food with it. He manages to retrieve one, barely avoiding the Grand High Witch's pet cat, Liebschen. They then attempt to return Bruno to his parents and get them to flee the hotel in case things go wrong, but they refuse to believe Helga's story about Bruno being turned into a mouse.
At dinnertime, Helga sneaks Luke into the kitchen and he overhears that all the witches have ordered cress soup. Despite some great difficulty, Luke manages to drop the bottle with the formula into the soup, but he is discovered by the staff and his tail is almost chopped off. By hiding inside the head chef's (Jim Carter) trouser leg, Luke escapes when the rest of the staff forcibly pull the head chef's trousers off and search frantically for him. Unfortunately, Mr. Jenkins (Bill Paterson), unsatisfied with his Cock-a-leekie soup, orders a bowl of cress soup, and Helga is only barely able to stop him consuming it. She finally manages to convince him of what has happened to Bruno when he sees Bruno greet him and the rest of the witches turn into mice. Mr. Stringer and the kitchen staff enter the chaos-ridden dining room and begin killing the mice, with Mr. Stringer himself slaying the Grand High Witch after being tipped off by Helga. During the scuffle, Helga and Luke return Bruno to his parents, go to bed and pack their bags and leave the next day.
Later on, back in their cottage in the countryside, Luke and Helga are delivered a trunk full of the Grand High Witch's money and her diary, something Luke had orchestrated earlier on in order to finance their possible mission to eradicate the witches around the world once and for all. During the night, the Grand High Witch's assistant, Miss Irvine (Jane Horrocks), whom the Grand High Witch had mistreated throughout her position, arrives at the cottage and uses her powers to turn Luke back into a human (nude), in the process returning his pet mice and glasses to him. Luke and Helga see her out of the window and bid her farewell as she leaves to repeat the process with Bruno.
Read more about this topic: The Witches (1990 Film)
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“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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