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!
