Review of The Craft (1996) by Oscar T — 27 Oct 2014

It's hard to hate a movie that completely adheres to its time period's expected stereotypes and typical style, especially almost 20 years since it was made but the long and short of it is, that although nostalgic, The Craft just isnt that great a film at all.

The premise is sound enough, After moving to a different state, a distraught and typically mentally challenged female falls into a friendship at school with a bunch of typical goths, who everyone appears to believe are witches.

It's not until a bit of experimentation that the girls discover that as a four piece, they can have all the power in the world and naturally abuse it to their advantage, that is until, one of them decides what their doing is morally wrong and wants out of the coven.

Played in a different direction, this film could have been an either tongue in cheek romp or and very dark and provoking film. However its plays typically and straight down the middle. the script is full of cliche, stereotypes and cheese ridden dialogue, that funnily enough IS trying to take itself seriously.

The acting is pretty stilted across the board, not one person gives a worth while performance and because every character is so 1 dimensionally written, even characters names cannot be remembered merely 5 minutes after the film.

It does a couple of things right, mainly in the middle section, once the ball gets rolling, the insecure, jealous witch decides to lose her shit and although her acting is terrible, a few nice ideas come out of the plot at this point,some are exectued nicely, others not so much.

But it soon falls foul again of its typical behaviour and were back to square one, where every things convienantly placed no matter how believable. The film isnt terrible and as a piece of nostalgia, its actually one of the better teen horrors that came from that time, if you can even call it that.

.. But in retrospect, this film will stay about for another 15 years until the small group of cult followers who do enjoy it grow up and completely lose interest.