The Craft (1996) This movie seemed so inevitable, it's a wonder John Hughes didn't think of making it one of his teen angst epics.......... with Molly Ringwald riding a broom around her suburban neighborhood.
There simply had to be movie that would at last answer the burning question......what would modern teen girls do if they discovered they possessed the power to practice witchcraft?
If you really need to ponder that question, you were either home schooled or you never saw any of the various versions of "Carrie".......
Teenage witchcraft exits for only two purposes.
#1. Healing debilitating physical defects that allows your peers to torment you (such as acne, drab hair color, or in the case of "The Craft", scarred flesh left over from 3rd degree burns)
#2. REVENGE!
And so our four willowy Wiccans proceed to do just that. A boorish jock who cruelly sullied one of the girls' reputations gets spell-casted into a simpering love slave. A mean girl pays for her racist crack when she's turned supernaturally turned bald faster than a chemo patient. A homeless bum who harasses another of our quartet is made to stand still long for a car to smack 'em dead.
You get the idea, right?
We've nothing much else to say about "The Craft", other than teen girls embraced it and it more or less inspired a similarly themed TV show, "Charmed". The film itself never rises above its by-the-numbers, connect-the-dots, 1-2-3-Kick! structure.
Except there is a true wild card Joker in this deck.......Fairuza Balk as the wildest, craziest and most dangerous of the witches. Balk commands the screen with a Bette Davis-Joan Crawford ferocity that generates whatever energy this film can muster.........(and with a plot that has nowhere to go, the film relies on her take-no-prisoners performance as an easy-peasy choice for a 3rd act villain.
And Balk doesn't disappoint. With flashing eyes, a perpetual sneer and an evil smile that outdoes every actor who ever played the Joker, she's the only thing that makes this movie even remotely worth watching.
We can only assume she also cast a spell on the ratings board, which somehow slapped an "R" rating on this altogether harmless little horror film. We don't remember seeing anything in this film that would justify that rating........you could call it a slightly less funny version of "Hocus Pocus"
For Fairuza alone, we'll conjure up 2 stars (**). We still would've preferred a Molly Ringwald/John Hughes version of this back in the 80's........maybe with Anthony Michael Hall desperately holding on to the broomstick bristles.......
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