Thursday, October 18, 2018

The Craft (Columbia Pictures, Red Wagon Entertainment, 1996)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I was in Hillcrest last night to see a movie being screened by FilmOut San Diego, which is ostensibly the Queer film festival organizing group in San Diego (though they announced they’re not having another full-dress festival until 2020) but also do monthly screenings of movies that aren’t necessarily Queer-themed but do have camp value. (I remember one year they announced they were doing a Hallowe’en-themed horror festival but it was all schlock from the 1970’s — I remember the lead-off movie was Suspiria — and it occurred to me that if I were the head of a Queer film group doing a horror festival the films I would lead off with would be The Bride of Frankenstein and Dracula’s Daughter.) The film they showed last night was a 1996 movie called The Craft, directed by Andrew Fleming from a script he co-wrote with Peter Filardi and starring Robin Tunney as Sarah Bailey, a high-school girl whose father, who’s raised her first as a single parent and then with a stepmother because her real mom died giving birth to her, has just moved her from San Francisco to Los Angeles and bought them a house that looks like it was built in the 19th century and whose roof leaks so relentlessly in the torrential rains that drench southern California (remember when it actually rained in southern California?) it seems like it hasn’t been fixed since. Naturally, when she shows up for her first day of school, she’s snubbed by virtually everybody — as Dorothy Parker wrote of Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth, if Messrs. Fleming and Filardi had outlined this plot to a friend and said, “Stop me if you’ve heard this before,” a good chunk of this screenplay would never have been written — only she’s embraced by three fellow students, all women and all self-proclaimed witches, who need a fourth member for their coven because they need one person to represent each of the four directions in their spells. 

The would-be witches are Nancy Downs (Fairuza Balk, 11 years after her quite remarkable performance as Dorothy Gale in the 1985 film Return to Oz, a quite good movie that didn’t deserve critical scorn and commercial oblivion even though I haven’t seen it since it was new), Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and the token Black witch, Rochelle (Rachel True). Sarah falls in with this group and goes shopping with them to an occult bookstore and supply shop owned by Lirio (Assumpta Serna), who’s sort of the Edward Van Sloan of this tale: dispensing not only supplies but also wisdom, warning the girls that whatever energy they put out, good or bad, will be returned to them three-fold. Sarah also finds herself attracted to good-natured but typically dumb jock Chris Hooker (Skeet Ulrich, whose baby face is hauntingly beautiful in his close-ups but the rest of his body seems like an afterthought) and puts a love spell on him — only she overdoes it, with the result that he hangs around her like the proverbial puppy dog, calls her at 3 a.m., shows up outside her home and ultimately takes her for a drive in the Hollywood Hills, whereupon he parks and tries to rape her. If Charles had been there during the screening I would have turned to him and joked, “36 years from now he’ll make it onto the Supreme Court,” but instead Nancy (who quickly emerges as the leader of the witch pack and the most thoroughly evil of the three) exacts revenge on Sarah’s behalf by going to a party Chris is throwing, assuming Sarah’s appearance, seducing Chris, then revealing her real self and pushing him out a second-floor window to his death. 

The Not-So-Fantastic-Four also take their revenge on Laura Lizzie (Christine Taylor), who’s sabotaged Rochelle’s attempts to make it onto the diving team because “I don’t like negroids,” by casting a spell on her to make her hair fall out. Then the four assemble on a beach with a book called Invocation of the Spirit, which is supposed to enable them to conjure up a being of incredible power who’s represented by giant lightning flashes sweeping across the sky; the being incarnates inside Nancy and makes her even more powerful and malevolent. Eventually Sarah gets the proverbial cold feet about the nasty, lethal shenanigans Nancy and the others are pulling. She wants out of the coven but is told that “in the old days” witches who wanted out of their covens were killed. In the film’s climax, Sarah’s home is beset by an invasion of snakes (earlier a homeless guy with a pet snake had tormented her and the other three girls had cast a spell on him so he’d be run over by a car; Nancy had also shown off her power to turn the red traffic lights green so they’d never have to stop when they were out in her car), worms, frogs and whatever annoying beasties the special-effects departments of Columbia Pictures and their co-producers, Red Wagon Entertainment, could come up with, and she also sees a TV news report that a plane containing her dad, stepmother and a whole bunch of other people flying from Los Angeles to San Francisco has crashed with no survivors. Sarah escapes by conjuring up the spirit of her dead mother, who was a “natural witch” and, unbeknownst to Sarah until this point, passed on her powers to Sarah — with the result that Sarah has full witch mojo while the other three girls lose their powers, and Bonnie and Rochelle have to continue their high-school careers as normal girls while Nancy is shown, in the film’s final scene, in an isolation cell in a mental institution, tied down to her bed and injected with tranquilizers while babbling about how she has the ability to fly. 

It was ironic to watch this movie the day after seeing Drop Dead Fred because for the second night in a row I was seeing a 1990’s film which had a great central concept and did disappointingly little with it — out of all the directions they could have taken their story, Fleming and Filardi went for the most obvious ones and I couldn’t help but think of the Twilight movies and Stephenie Meyers’ relative skill in doing a similar theme (a student newly arrived at a new school encounters supernatural powers and connects with them) and doing it far better, with much more emotional resonance. One surprise from the imdb.com page on The Craft is that Fairuza Balk is a practicing Wiccan and appointed herself a consultant to the filmmakers — she even briefly owned the real-life occult store on which Lirio’s business is based — and put them in touch with Wiccans who could answer questions about “the craft” that she couldn’t. But this film takes such a stereotypically negative view of witches and “the craft” that the revelation that one of its stars is a real-life Wiccan is like Paul Robeson starring as Little Black Sambo. The Craft is yet another bad (or at best mediocre) movie that could have been great, and it occurred to me that not only did its basic situation seem like the sort of thing that makes it onto Lifetime, but a modern-day Lifetime version (especially if Christine Conradt wrote it) might even be better!