10 Enchanting Movie Spells

Eat Slugs

The Spell: When Malfoy calls Hermione a "filthy little mudblood", Ron sees red.

He goes to attack Malfoy, but his spell backfires, and he spends the rest of the afternoon vomiting slugs.

The Ingredients: A broken wand, the incantation ("Eat Slugs!"), and a whole load of rage.

How We'd Use It: Wreak havoc by staging a guerrilla operation at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show.

Popularity Contest

The Spell: In witch world, it is forbidden to force another person to fall in love with you. Says so in the Witches' Etiquette Guide.

Goofy Louise bends the rules a bit, using spell skillz to make herself the most popular girl in school, and thereby winning the love of hunky Brad. Sneaky.

The Ingredients: Apparently it's important that you're the reincarnation of a dead witch. That's us out then.

How We'd Use It: We'd probably give it to Gordon Brown, bless him. Turns out Tony used up all the Labour reserves in his first year.

Llama Face

The Spell: When evil Yzma plots to assassinate Emperor Kuzco, she gives him the wrong potion, and he ends up turning into a llama.

The Ingredients: You'll need essence of llama, a secret lab, and an oafish assistant. Oh, and you'll need to be scary beyond all reason.

How We'd Use It: We'd go to Longleat and turn all the lions into llamas, then set them loose in the Wiltshire countryside.

Then we'd sit back and watch their confused little llama faces as they blunder around frantically hoofing everyone, wondering where the hell their claws have gone.

Eternal Youth

The Spell: When the handsome and youthful Dorian Gray has his portrait painted, he pledges to remain as he appears in the picture, in exchange for his soul.

Unfortunately for Dorian, the painting morphs over time to reveal his true self.

It ain't pretty.

The Ingredients: Bit of paper, some watercolours, and lots and lots of vanity.

How We'd Use It: Well, we'd probably just stick the damned painting on Ebay. You don't need that Unique Insight Into Inner Ugliness in your life.

The Philter

The Spell: Biochemists Paul and Diane chance across an elixir which makes you utterly irresistable to the opposite sex as soon as you start talking.

Oddly enough, it also makes people of the same sex very hostile towards you.

So, if you're gay, umm, it's not going to work.

The Ingredients: It's not very clear, as it's acquired under mysterious circumstances. Whatever's in Lynx, probably.

How We'd Use It: Liberally .

Deep Freeze

The Spell: When Willow finds the castle of Tir Asleen, he discovers it's been put under a spell by the evil Bavmorda.

Result: everybody within the castle has been frozen in ice.

The Ingredients: Presumably, you'll need a fair amount of Evil. And maybe some ice poles, just to get the ball rolling.

How We'd Use It: You could probably do a lot of good with this trick.

We'd round up all the pigeons of the world and herd them off to Antarctica. Then we'd use them to plug up all the melty bits.

The Resurrection

The Spell: When Sally (Sandra Bullock) accidentally puts a shade too much belladonna in Jimmy's tequila, he falls down dead.

Panicking, she and her sister Gillian (Nicole Kidman) try to resurrect his lifeless body, using a forbidden spell.

The Ingredients: Squirty cream, apparently.

How We'd Use It: Not sure that we would. Imagine bringing back someone who's been dead longer than a day. We're not doctors but they'd probably be all swollen and liquidy. With bits coming off.

Dance Of Death

The Spell: Witches Winifred, Sarah and Mary need to get the parents out of the way so that they can suck the lifeforces out of children without interruption.

So, they end up at the dance hall, where a Hallowe'en ball is in full swing.

Winifred sings 'I Put A Spell On You' which, appropriately, lays a charm on the adults that forces them to keep dancing until they drop down dead.

The Ingredients: Bette Midler, a Nina Simone song (a Sonique cover version will do), dry ice.

How We'd Use It: On cats.

The Old Hag

The Spell: Poor Sophie is the victim of a spell cast by the Witch Of The Waste.

Jealous of the attention Sophie receives from the wizard Howl, the witch turns Sophie into a haggard old bint.

The Ingredients: If the Witch of the Waste is anything to go by, it looks like all you need is about a million chins. No wonder she's jealous of Sophie.

How We'd Use It: To get free bus rides. Old people can go anywhere for free, you know. Anywhere . We'd go for Thorpe Park.

The Magic Balls

The Spell: Jareth, the Goblin King, is very good at magic. He's so good that he can produce little glass balls out of thin air. And then roll them around a bit. Now that's good magicking.

The Ingredients: We weren't joking when we said thin air. That's the sole ingredient.

You probably will need a mullet and a massive pouch, though.

How Wed Use It: Ooh, the mischief you could cause with those little glass balls. We'd spend hours in the park, tripping up skateboarders.