Hocus Pocus 2 (PG), on Disney+
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This is the 2022 sequel to the 1993 film Hocus Pocus. It starts in 1653, on Winifred Sanderson's 16th birthday. Salem's reverend Traske (Tony Hale) wants to force her to marry a man she doesn't want to marry, but she refuses. (He doesn't want to marry her either, but apparently he's willing to acquiesce to the reverend's order, and is grateful that Winifred refuses.) So, Reverend Traske banishes Winifred from Salem, and separates her from her sisters, Sarah and Mary. But the three of them manage to escape together to the forbidden woods, where they meet a witch who gives Winifred a living spell book.
In the present, there's a girl named Becca, whose 16th birthday falls on Halloween. She has a friend named Izzy, and the two of them used to be friends with a girl named Cassie Traske, but she hasn't hung out with them for some time now. Cassie's father is Jefry Traske (also played by Hale), who is the mayor of Salem and a descendant of Reverend Traske. Becca and Izzy do a lot of witchy stuff for fun, so they spend time at a magic shop run by a man named Gilbert, who gives Becca a magical candle for her birthday. Becca and Izzy unwittingly resurrect the Sanderson sisters with the candle, and just like the previous film, the sisters have to find a way to cast a spell that would prevent them from disappearing at sunrise. But this time, Winifred decides to cast a different spell than in the first movie, one that would make her the most powerful witch in the world. Meanwhile, they cast a spell on Gilbert that forces him to search for ingredients for the other spell, and he gets help from the zombie Billy Butcherson. Becca and Izzy (and eventually Cassie) have to try to stop the Sanderson sisters.
Well, I had fun watching the movie, but it definitely wasn't quite as good as the original. I did like Gilbert's original idea that the Sanderson sisters had turned to evil because they basically had no choice. I definitely thought they weren't as bad as the reverend and the rest of the Salem townsfolk, and I feel like if they hadn't lived in such a repressive era they might never have become witches. (Or if they had, that they could have been good ones.) But Gilbert's belief that they could be good in the present was totally wrong and a plot point that was immediately dropped without any exploration, which I found disappointing. Other than that... there's a bit that I kind of liked about Cassie's boyfriend learning to his surprise that he had been making fun of people like Becca and Izzy, which wasn't his intention. And I don't know what else to say about the plot.