“The ladies have a craving for bagels and ice cream.”

Part feminist fantasy, part showcase for Jack Nicholson’s irreverent personality, part special effects extravaganze, George Miller’s The Witches of Eastwick adapts John Updike’s novel into an bawdy horror comedy that comes complete with voodoo dolls, flaming cellos, gratuitous projectile vomit, and a physics-breaking game of tennis set to classical music.

Working in the same devilish mode that would characterize his performance as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, top-billed Nicholson portrays Daryl Van Horne, a wealthy mystery man who is summoned to Eastwick, Rhode Island by a trio of unwitting witches who have all lost their spouses through divorce, desertion, or death. He purchases a famous old mansion on the edge of town and then begins pursuing each of the three women. First is Alexandra (Cher), a sculptress; then Jane (Susan Sarandon), a music teacher; then Sukie (Michelle Pfeiffer), a local journalist.

The thing is, none of the women find him attractive, at least at first. After sharing lunch with the man and enduring his extremely forward advances (his style is less seduction and more just brashly asking women to bed), Alex declares him to be “physically repulsive, intellectually retarded, morally reprehensible, vulgar, insensitive, selifsh, stupid, tasteless, humorless, and smelly.” This is certainly not the man of their dreams that they drunkenly manifested in between bites of crackers and cheez whiz on girls’ night. “You’re not even interesting enough to make me sick,” she says. And yet through some dark magic (read: by appealing to her desire for sexual freedom and exuding faux feminist sympathy), he talks her into bed. The others succumb in short order, and soon they’re one big happy harem—er, “family.”

The situation casts a shadow of evil over the entire town. Most of the gossip consists of little more than moral condemnation, but Felicia (Veronica Cartwright), the puritanical wife of Sukie’s boss (Richard Jenkins), falls into extreme hysterics. Her intuition is dead-on, but her wild ululations do nothing but fan the flames. Eventually, the devil behind the façade is revealed and all hell breaks loose in a lengthy finale that sees Jack Nicholson morph into a sweaty, wounded, feral animatronic monster bent on destruction.

Miller’s first feature length film outside of his original Mad Max trilogy, The Witches of Eastwick seems informed to a certain degree by the director’s time working on the Twilight Zone: The Movie. But as much as its tone feels akin to other films directed or produced by Spielberg (including a score from John Williams), its surplus of innuendo and straight up raunch (credit to a wickedly funny and bold script from Michael Cristofer) ensure that it’s something else entirely—a campy and occasionally hysterical supernatural horror film that balances the dark and the light, the masculine and the feminine, the wacky and the weird.