The Craft

Sarah Baily (Robin Tunney), just wanted to forget about San Francisco and her attempt at suicide. So her and her father and her step mom (her real mom died in childbirth) move to LA where she meets up with three other girls in a preppy Catholic school. It turns out that the three girl are into witchcraft and the entire school knows it. At first they don't like Sarah, because the leader Nancy (Fairuza Balk) hates everybody, but when they discover that she is also a witch, they want her to complete their coven, their circle.  Sarah's not too sure, because they freak her out a bit, with all their talk of the supreme spirit being everything and in everything. But when she goes out with a jock, Chris (Skeet Ulric) and he start spreading rumors about her, she joins the coven.

They cast a spell, or rather four spells, one for each.  Rochelle (Rachel True) asks for the blond bimbo who makes fun of her to get her comeuppance, Bonny (Neve Campbell) asks to be beautiful, because she is covered in scars, Sarah wants people to love her, ie. Chris. While Nancy asks for the entire power of their god. Three of the four start working and Nancy is getting bent out of shape when the other two girls start liking Sarah more than her. When Nancy's step dad dies and her and her mother are left with a huge sum of change, Nancy know her wish was granted. They decide to invoke the spirit by calling the four corners. Only when it works and Nancy gets blessed, she goes completely out her mind. It's that whole, 'Power corrupts' thing.

After a while Sarah is becoming worried about how her friends are dealing with their magic. Bonny and Rochelle have turned into bubbled-headed bimbos, giggling and drunk with the power, while Nancy is becoming more and more unstable. After Chris is killed, Sarah calls it quits with the coven and things turn ugly.  Especially when Sarah tries to do a binding spell on Nancy that doesn't work. Her three friends turn on her, using magic against her.

The only option Sarah has is to invoke the spirit, like Nancy, to balance the magic out. Magic's all about balance, there can't be good without the bad. She freaks Bonny and Rochelle out and it's only her and Nancy. Sarah is the better witch and the fight doesn't last long. At the end, she binds Nancy's magic, so she can't hurt anyone else.

Bonny and Rochelle visit Sarah, unconvincingly asking for forgiveness, but they just went because their magic left them and they wanted to see if Sarah had any left. They find out she does, and she hasn't forgiven them when she calls a bolt of lighting to strike a tree branch directly above them, nearly killing them.  The last scene we see is Nancy in a loony bin, claiming she can fly.

I was a little disappointed by the end of this movie. It happened way to fast and seemed really hurried. It was good up to that point, if a little slow. It was like they wanted to make up for lost time and made the titanic clashing of good versus evil five minutes long.

Other than that, the movie was pretty good. The plot seemed to flow, there were no weird holes, or terrible acting. There are two things that I don't get. One is why does their spirit, who is older than the belief in god, have a French sounding name? Should it have been like Sumerian, who were the first civilization? Any why is he male? All the early creation gods were female. Maybe that's why when Sarah invoked the spirit , her direction was North, with the mother and earth, or something.

Whatever. It was an okay movie, I just don't know why it was categorized as a horror, it wasn't scary. But then again a lot of horror movies don't scare me. 

Grade: 6.5 /10