The Craft (1996)

Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney), a sixteen year old troubled teenager with a painful past and a history of suicidal tendencies and hallucinations, moves to L.A. with her father and stepmother to start a new life - and is enrolled into a Catholic school. It is at school that she comes into contact with three unlikely friends, Nancy (Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle (Rachel True), all of whom are socially outcast with various problems in their lives that they wish they could fix. Nancy, Bonnie and Rochelle dabble in occult practices, and when they notice Sarah has the powers of a natural witch, they talk her into joining their coven (I thought covens had thirteen members). When Sarah joins, they soon realize that with a fourth witch in the coven they can begin to cast spells they couldn't before, and begin to amend all the things wrong in their lives - but like everything else in life - things come with a price...hilarity.

Trivia: Features over 3,000 snakes including pythons, boas, water snakes, garter snakes, rat snakes, and a 10 foot Amazon constrictor - even rare albino snakes. Robin Tunney wore a wig in this because she had shaved her head for Empire Records. Though all of the actresses playing teenagers were far past teenage years, at the time of filming Rachel True was almost 30 years old. The shots of Nancy being covered in bugs were created by wrapping a life-cast of Fairuza Balk's head and torso in green screen material. The bugs were filmed crawling all over the casting and then digitally composited on top of a live action plate of Balk. On the special edition DVD of this film, Andrew Fleming states in the commentary that the production was geared toward earning a PG-13 rating from the MPAA. They followed all of the guidelines to earn that rating, but in the final outcome the film was rated R because the film dealt with teenage girls using witchcraft.

This was an okay movie and all but there was something missing. It is hard to explain, it needed more something. I'm not quite sure what. The four witches were nice to look at (mmm Neve Campbell) sure but their back stories were not really dealt with in any great detail. They all had problems. Sarah has suicide issues. Nancy's step-father is abusive. Bonnie was burned or something as a child leaving a large burn scar on her back shoulder and upper left arm. Rochelle was teased about her race by a blond girl. But it was like the writers added those facts as an afterthought. (Oh yeah, we need to give these girls motivation to want to be witches and right the wrongs done to them in the recent past) Even the fact that Sarah's mother was a good witch (who died in child birth) was kind of glossed over and her contribution to the story would have flew right past me if I hadn't read the Wikipedia entry.