#9 - The Craft (1996)

The Craft (1996)

(dir. Andrew Fleming)

A group of female students at a Catholic high school who are into witchcraft gain actual powers when a new student with innate magical ability joins up with them. They do the sort of things you'd expect teenage witches would do, like cast love spells and get revenge on bullies. Inevitably, things start to get a little out of control and some bad witchy antics ensue. I'm a sucker for horror movies about witches and/or the occult, but this one fell very flat for me.

Despite being the target demographic for this when it came out, I never saw it back in high school. I may have enjoyed it more if I had some nostalgia for it, but I'm watching it for the first time in 2019 and it just feels extremely dated. The dialogue is terrible (both in the writing and in the mumbly awkward way the lines are delivered), the characters are shallow, and the effects have aged incredibly poorly. It's a film about goth high school girls but all the music is lame jangly '90s pop/rock - shouldn't it be Nick Cave or Nine Inch Nails? I also just couldn't take Fairuza Balk seriously at all. Julie pointed out that her makeup makes her look like Dr. Frank N. Furter and that's all I could think of.

It does have some fun moments, especially in the final ~20 minutes where it goes a little bonkers, but overall I didn't care for it. Even ignoring the dated parts, the execution of basically everything is very poor. I'd like to see a remake, because I feel like there are plenty of interesting stories that could be told using the basic premise (the teenage angst of feeling like an outsider, being ashamed of one's family, suicide, etc). This film sort of touches on these themes but ultimately fails to do anything interesting with them.