The Craft A Film Review By Michael Redman Copyright 1996 Michael Redman
** (out of ****)
Four teenage girls at a Los Angeles Catholic high school who have ample reasons to hate the world (even beyond the fact that they are teenagers) attempt to solve their problems by becoming witches -- with disastrous results.
As the result of a Wiccan advisor, the film has about as much accuracy in the area of witchcraft as you could hope for in the midst of a quasi-horror movie from an effects-happy Hollywood. Some of the rituals and concepts come directly from the modern neo-pagan religions, but then the special effects blow it all away into science fiction land. It's as if a scene in a film about Christianity featured a priest performing a baptism with a flood of water flowing from his fingers and lightning bolts shooting from his eyes.
Films featuring religion as the center point have always been a difficulty for mainstream studios, especially belief systems that are seen as The Other. The easy approach is to grab the most exotic and sensational aspects and go with them: Moslems as Jihad warriors, Hindus as fakirs, witches as power-hungry spell-casters. At least there is none of the usual miscasting of witches as Satan worshipers.
This story does capture the teen fascination with magick as a means to their ends. A couple of the universal truths of adolescence are feelings of powerlessness and a dissatisfaction with the cultural status quo. Magick is seen as a cure for both. Empowerment in a way sure to piss off the parents. When the girls perform a ritual to evoke a powerful spirit, they are in true form: over their heads with precision in their act but no grounding in theology.
When one of the young witches realizes that things are falling apart (a slow learner, she catches on after several deaths and her coven-mates begin attacking her), she goes to an older witch for help. The elder practitioner gives her a few hints, but our young friend runs away before she can help much.
The movie especially falls apart towards the end. One of the three "bad" witchs seems to see the error of using magick to control others and then suddenly she's back in the role of "evil" without explaination. The tale moral appears to be one of the main Wiccan beliefs: what you put out, you get back threefold – the witch's version of the Golden Rule. The good little witch supposedly believes that and uses it to defeat her opponents, but the last scene shows her using her powers in an act of vengeance to scare and warn her former friends.
As a horror film aimed at the younger set, this is nothing amazing, but does stand a chance of becoming a cult (no pun intended) classic. It topped the box office list during its first weekend in release. Checking out the pagan newsgroups on the internet, the Wiccan opinion seems to be "It's not as bad as we feared."
[This appeared in the 5/9/96 "Bloomington Voice", Bloomington, Indiana. Michael Redman can be contacted at redman@bvoice.com]
-- mailto:redman@bvoice.com This week's film review at http://www.bvoice.com/ Film reviews archive at http://us.imdb.com/M/reviews_by?Michael%20Redman
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