Hansel & Gretel: Warriors of Witchcraft (2013)

What a waste of my time!!!

Very well executed

Brilliant and touching

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

Great movie. Has a lot action and motivation, you can see it in the actors' faces. Fantastic choreography with a lot of movement and excitement, also magical in various ways. No they didn't repeat scenes and no they didn't use macaroni as power balls. Very magical and I absolutely love this. I cannot stop watching it!!! Maybe the cover didn't fit with the movie, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't fantastic. Maybe it it didn't even have a gingerbread house like the actual Hansel and Gretel story, but this is more of a modern version. The witch's man voice showed how aggressive she was.Even though my family and I saw the microphone on the reflection on the window in the movie, doesn't mean the movie was crappy, it's just a little mistake.

I was tempted to give this film one, or if possible fewer stars. I felt two was deserved because as bad as this film was it did keep me watching where many others would have forced me to turn off. It has the look of having been knocked up in a weekend. The special effects would have looked magical 5 decades ago but nowadays it is probable that they could have been created on a mobile phone and been far more impressive. The script from the film is the sort of thing that would be expected from a student during their first term at college if they had been asked to have it ready by Monday. Lines seem out of place and unrealistic and the overall pacing is wrong. There are scenes that are needlessly drawn out, indeed drawn out to such an extent as to be damaging to the feel and sense of the action; correspondingly there are scenes that are rushed onto the screen at such a fast pace that all realism is destroyed. I do not consider the acting to have been all that bad. Some scenes were very poorly acted but given the feel of the rest of the film I would imagine the fault lies with the director. I remember thinking that having appeared in this film was a good way of ensuring the end of an acting career but on the whole the acting was probably of a higher standard than the writing, direction, set design, in fact everything else about the movie. The film can be encapsulated as being like a bad accident; you won't want to watch it but you might not be able to draw your attention away. I can see a long future for this film as an example of what not to do in any school that deals with acting and direction.

Twins Jonah and Ella go to an elite prep school (Lebkuchen Haus, which is German for gingerbread house; the only reference to the fairy tale) because Jonah is always getting into fights. This is ridiculous enough that it might be a good enough reason to stop watching the film.Jonah is assigned a room with Charles, who does not get along well with others. Nice. Charles warns Jonah that one either eats or gets eaten at the school. Charles is at the school through scholarship obtained by merit. Jonah is there through influence from his adoptive parents; he was born into a lower social setting. So, Charles has two reasons not to like him.Ella is assigned a room with Kristen, who works on the school paper. Kristen used Google to find out all sorts of information about Ella. Kristen thinks she has a kick-ass story that will blow the lid off the school.In Jonah's first class (held outside; sure), Ms Thomas goes on about Golding's hypothesis that humans naturally reject civilisation whenever possible and descend into savagery. Jonah appears not to be listening, but then again, he's a perfect example of the lesson. When asked about what had been said, though, Jonah summarised it in one sentence.Jonah finds that there are witches at the school, and they invite him to join. They know, somehow, that he has a circular birthmark at the back of his head, just as all of them do. They show him that he can do some unexpected things, and swear him to secrecy.Charles warned of students going missing; he decides to leave before it happens to him. Kristen goes missing; Ella tries to follow her research. She ends up following Jonah, and asks him what he has been up to; Jonah stays quiet about it. Some of Kristen's research involves the coming of European witches to America, and the attempt of the 'Great Witch of the Woods' to rule in the Americas. Despite the fact that many of the followers were put down in Salem, the GWW is still alive and about 400 years old, and has new followers in the Circle. The job of the Circle is to find young souls for the GWW to feast on. The counter current here is the presence of a few who have witch skills but are tasked with killing evil witches; these people would be 'witch slayers.'-----Scores-----Cinematography: 5/10 Amateurish. The re-use of some of the campus stock footage was beyond irritating. Some short clips were each repeated at least ten to twelve times.Sound: 0/10 Fracking hideous. The sound has multiple personalities: (a) pieces of the score sound as if they were made in the 1970s by an out of work composer with a lesser grade synthesizer (b) other pieces are florid, symphonic, and ridiculous for an action film (c) another set of background music is second rate industrial, say late 1990s. Some of the conversations were very badly miked, and sounded noticeably hollow.Acting: 0/10 The leads were dull non-actors who are a huge anchor around the neck of this drowning film. Booboo, in particular, is so poor that it is painful to watch any scene he is in. His attempts to read a sentence from a book were pathetic. Judy Norton and Eric Roberts were wasted. Roberts' slurred speech in the early scenes sounded as if he was recovering from something, and that hair cut was laughable. What was the director thinking? Screenplay: 0/10 Why would an ineffective ruffian (Jonah) be placed in an elite prep school? It's like asking a fish to walk 100 miles in a desert at the height of summer. What were the real reasons that he was admitted? Why would his sister go as well? The answers come late, and were not that interesting when they showed up. The dialog was between sub-standard and just plain bad. The great dramatic moment at the end was a complete dud.SFX: 0/10 Laughable: both uninteresting and not believable. Zero was too high a score.

This is not a good movie. If that's all you need to know, then you don't have to go any further. It's badly acted, badly directed, has no budget, the script makes no sense, there's no continuity, the camera work is pathetic, and the story flat out contradicts itself on several occasions. As a purveyor of bad movies, I naturally enjoyed it a whole lot.The story follows Jonah and Ella (no, not Hansel and Gretal... that would be stupid!) as they are kicked out of yet another high school because her brother has misbehaved in some vague manner. They are accepted into one of the most 'prestigious' schools in the nation at Salem Massachusetts. I say 'prestigious' because they keep talking about how well respected it is despite the fact that there would appear to be only one or two buildings, the dorms consist of a single room with two beds and, oh yeah, people have been murdered and/or found severely brain damaged on campus, although from what I can tell nobody has really made a big deal of it. Jonah gets into a fight almost immediately with the most stereotypical jock ever, and after complaining that nobody ever talks to him he immediately tells the only people who want to talk to him to f**k off. He's then invited by the jock that beat him up to come perform witchcraft and suck out the souls of other students, which he readily agrees to (I can't stress enough how fast he goes from 'nobody likes me' to 'i'm a complete jerk').Ella, meanwhile, begins to think that something is afoot as she repeatedly talks to her guidance councilor who tells her all about the rumors of witchcraft at the school, telling Ella that it was prophesied that a set of twins would kill the cult of witches that reside there. Spoiler alert, the councilor is the head witch (who told her all about them). I'd say it's a surprise except every time you see 'mysterious robed witch' it's clearly a middle-aged woman, and the only woman the characters have any real interaction is the middle-aged guidance councilor.Along the way, Ella finds that her parents were witch hunters who were killed by the same witch group, so she decides to kill the witches with a knife she found while investigating a bookshelf because... it had.. circles on it? She learns how to kill witches from her creepy stalker principle who trains her by throwing baseballs at her. They do this while the witches stand not 10 feet from them watching, and are then surprised when one of them stabs the principle in broad daylight. Anyways, she eventually convinces her brother that killing people to drain their souls is bad, and after the shortest non-fight ever they kill the witch and decide to leave. To say it's a short fight would be an understatement. The head witch reveals her identity, says they don't stand a chance, is immediately stabbed by Ella, then explodes. Then they find out their real names were Hansel and Gretel, because apparently they didn't know their own names due to their parents dying...or something... Where to begin on what this movie does wrong? You already likely noticed that this movie has NOTHING to do with Hansel and Gretel outside of the eventual reveal that their names are coincidentally the same and that one of the school buildings is called 'gingerbread house'. The witches are completely non-threatening, and seem to sabotage themselves at every opportunity. They claim that it was 'destined' that the two would go to the school yet it was the school THAT INVITED THEM THERE in the first place. Then they decide to stop them fulfilling the prophecy by TELLING THEM THEY ARE WITCHES. While both actors ARE siblings, it's strange that they both have black belts yet have maybe 2 seconds worth of fighting. It's a waste that I'd think even THESE directors would have noticed, but apparently not.The night scenes are clearly filmed during the day and they just tinted the screen blue... you can even see the sun! And at one point they are inside at night then someone opens the door and it's clearly the middle of the day!Ella's shirt changes between every scene, and she even wears it backwards sometimes. Not to say she has a large wardrobe, she just changes back and forth between 2 or 3 shirts over and over. There's 10 kids in the entire school that occupy the backgrounds, making 'afro-boy' and 'girl with pink backpack' my favorite characters in the whole movie. They re-use the same stock footage too many times (not just same angle, but same people in same position), and they have still images as establishing shots. They say it takes place in Massachusetts despite looking a lot like California and having the California flag in the corner of a room in several shots. For some reason witches explode into stars when stabbed, using CG like in the original Star Trek. You can see the camera crew in several reflections throughout the movie. Oh, and the scene on the cover where they wear leather armor brandishing crossbows while walking away from an exploding castle? Yeah, that never happens. They never change out of t-shirts, and the only weapon in the entire movie is the dagger that Ella finds. There is no castle, and nothing explodes. Honestly I could keep going on, but when I tried listing all the flaws I ended up going over the 1000 word limit. This movie is a complete waste of time and money, unless you're looking for something that's so awful it's funny, in which case go for it. In that regards I liked it enough to give it a 2, but it probably doesn't deserve that.