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#139 - The Craft
Andrew Fleming, 1996
A high-schooler with a mysterious past moves to a new school and falls in with a trio of outcasts who are revealed to be witches.
Yeah, so The Craft is most definitely not a good movie. It's hard not to think of it as a season one episode of Buffy stretched out to feature length, only its lead characters lack even the requisite level of charm of that particular show. Out of the lead quartet, Fairuza Balk is the only one that stands out on her own merits and that's only because she's the least wooden, though that distinction comes at the expense of her being so ridiculously over-the-top (especially during the film's later stages) that it's almost comical (but sadly it's not). The effects work is bad, as is the writing that barely makes me care about the lead characters (except maybe in the case of Rachel True's character, who suffers some ridiculously racist bullying from Christine Taylor's stereotypically bitchy character, but that doesn't last long as she joins in with the other witches' more blatantly villainous behaviour). The soundtrack roots this film in the mid-1990s for better or worse (is that the same version of "How Soon is Now?" that they used as the theme song for Charmed? Double nostalgia!) Too bad the resulting film takes itself way too seriously even for a goofy high-school witch movie.
Andrew Fleming, 1996
A high-schooler with a mysterious past moves to a new school and falls in with a trio of outcasts who are revealed to be witches.
Yeah, so The Craft is most definitely not a good movie. It's hard not to think of it as a season one episode of Buffy stretched out to feature length, only its lead characters lack even the requisite level of charm of that particular show. Out of the lead quartet, Fairuza Balk is the only one that stands out on her own merits and that's only because she's the least wooden, though that distinction comes at the expense of her being so ridiculously over-the-top (especially during the film's later stages) that it's almost comical (but sadly it's not). The effects work is bad, as is the writing that barely makes me care about the lead characters (except maybe in the case of Rachel True's character, who suffers some ridiculously racist bullying from Christine Taylor's stereotypically bitchy character, but that doesn't last long as she joins in with the other witches' more blatantly villainous behaviour). The soundtrack roots this film in the mid-1990s for better or worse (is that the same version of "How Soon is Now?" that they used as the theme song for Charmed? Double nostalgia!) Too bad the resulting film takes itself way too seriously even for a goofy high-school witch movie.