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Review by C.J. Bunce

Every bit like a crazy and dark Sam Raimi production, Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters takes an already creepy Grimm fairy tale and amplifies it into a bloody Rated R monster movie.  It is as true as you could probably hope to get to the spirit of the original story of two kids who outwit a witch in a house made of candy.  We even get to see the original tale laid out nearly verbatim to the centuries-old story, including the triumph of the kids who foil the witch and throw her into the oven.

But that is only the beginning of the tale, and this is the story after the story, a sequel where Hansel and Gretel become mercenaries who hire themselves out to small forest towns to rid them of the plague of witches who have stolen nearly a dozen children.  Witch Hunters never takes itself seriously.  Images of the missing children end up on printed broadsides on the 1800 version of a milk bottle.  And after decades of consuming candy, Hansel is diabetic (he has the “sugar” disease) and must take an early form of insulin to prevent him from dying.

Harkening back to the German origins of the fairy tale, Witch Hunters is a German production with lots of German design influences.  Like the original Grimm tales this is a violent and gory story.  Witches are instantly the unsympathetic villains who are bad for bad’s sake.  Led by the beautiful Famke Janssen, who for most of the film dons some impressive prosthetics, these witches are the stuff of the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz.  A motley assemblage of Halloween-esque witches with brooms don dark garb on their own evil sabbath day and congregate in a spot in the woods in something strangely similar to an annual rally in Sturgis.

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