The Craft (1996)

Such a frustrating disappointment

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The Craft is a movie starring 4 (epically super cute) girls that in no way should be misconstrued as a chick flick, because, I'm a dude, and I love The Craft. It's honestly 1 of my favorite movies. It's exactly the type of film I'm into. It happens to be about witchcraft, but that's just the backdrop. The story focuses on young Sarah (the insatiably cute Robin Tunney) and her 3 teenage girl friends, Nancy (the perfectly cute-faced Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (the spiritually and physically adorably cute Neve Campbell), and Rochelle (the crazy sensually cute Rachel True) whom are all far more than just your typical high schoolers worshiping the occult (spoiler alert) - they're witches! I love The Craft so much. It speaks from the heart as well as any movie you'll find. I would love to be with each one of this super sweet woman. I love Robin in this and End of Days and Empire Records and The In-Laws and Supernova and Vertical Limit and Encino Man and Open Window. I love Fairuza in this and The Waterboy and American History X and The Island of Dr. Moreau and Almost Famous and Valmont and Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead and Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. I love Neve in this and Scream and Wild Things and Scream 2 and 54 and Drowning Mona and Three to Tango and Scream 3 and When Will I Be Loved and I Really Hate My Job and Scream 4. I love Rachel in this and Half Baked and Embrace of the Vampire and CB4 and New Best Friend and The Perfect Holiday. I looooove Rachel, Christine 2, but Robin's the prettiest. The supernatural 'light as a feather stiff as a board' scene is vintage '90s.

This starts off as your usual teen move a girl moves to a new town and finds it hard to fit. Then she meets three girls with inexplicable powers. She soon gets embroiled with them and discovers they're practicing witchcraft! Throughout the movie there's a great sense of fun malice. Faruza Baulk is the real star in this being a total bitch. The ending is perfect. Turn your brains off and enjoy this preHarry Potter occult movie. Great fun

I wanted to like The Craft more than I do. It has lots of appealing ingredients, including a pretty solid main cast and a story with lots of potential that puts young women front and center. I think my issues with it come down to tone and pacing. There are plenty of scenes that feel very natural and organic, especially those that feature the four main girls together; and then there are jarring scenes (for example, the vagrant with the snake) that seem to come from a different movie. Many of the adults (or, at least, the older actors playing adult roles, as opposed to the adult actors playing teenagers) are somewhat off, including Tunney's father and Assumpta Serna as the owner of the Wicca shop. Helen Shaver, as Fairuza Balk's trashy mother, gives the only performance that meshes well with what the teenagers are doing. Balk herself, though she excels at bringing menacing tension and unpredictability to her performance as the most unhinged of the four main girls, sometimes goes overboard with the histrionics, such as the bedroom scene with Skeet Ulrich at the party. The other girls' -- Robin Tunney, Neve Campbell and Rachel True -- performances stay more grounded through the movie, even as the increasingly unnatural events unfold. (Campbell and Ulrich, who would co-star as high school paramours in a film, Scream, that overshadowed this movie, don't have much interaction here, but I thought Ulrich was actually better -- and certainly funnier -- here as the bewitched, bothered and bewildered wanna-be boyfriend of Tunney.)All in all, the film feels like it wasn't thought through as thoroughly as it could have been. There are intriguing, post-Carrie ideas here about witchcraft and paganism as metaphors for girls' sexual development, but they don't really go anywhere even as the girls become more sexualized (and their skirts get shorter) as they become more confident in their craft. There are elements that feel forced or blunt -- such as the over-the-top overt racism shoved in True's character's face -- when a subtler approach would have been more effective and believable. There are the jarring tonal shifts that make me feel like director Andrew Fleming didn't have complete mastery of his own material. (Fleming also co-wrote the screenplay.) This is still a reasonably entertaining film with some effective scenes, memorable imagery and good performances. In more skillful hands or with more time and money, it could have been much more than that.

This is like the movie "with-it" liberal parents might take their budding teen daughter to go see in the late 90's, its a movie used so parents can tell kids, I know you may experiment with drugs but using too much can be dangerous. Y'know, stupid magic is used in place of drugs, they call it a metaphor. I mean maybe its that The Craft is a predictable, tame movie that makes the movie so dull. I would assume a film about magic and teenage girls should be some intense serious sh*t, but The Craft a movie specifically about teen girls and magic...yeah,no,not intense. If you love this movie, then love it, I salute you, it does nothing for me. I prefer my movies about teenage girls and magic to be awesome or at least not phony.