Director: Zoe Lister-Jones
90 minutes (15) 2020
Sony Blu-ray
[Released 8th March]
Rating: 6/10
Review by Steven Hampton
Andrew Fleming’s fantasy movie about witches, The Craft (1996) helped to make stars of Robin Tunney, Neve Campbell, and Fairuza Balk. Young Sarah joins a trio of wiccan girls at her new school, practicing levitation, love spells, and healing body-scars. Accidentally creating instant-wealth for a trashy single-mother (Helen Shaver), leads them astray into revenge until the Goth-girl walks on water, and their growing hysteria prompts a murder. There’s a menace of illusions, infestations, invocations, transformations, and the magical deity Manon summoned. Balk easily deserves the best performance award. “Blessed be.”
Although Blumhouse have a spotty track-record of revivals and remakes of notable genre productions, including variably successful Halloween (2018), Black Christmas (2019), The Invisible Man, and Fantasy Island (both 2020), following an unrelated remake of TV show Charmed (2018), the cultural revisionism in The Craft: Legacy may well have seemed a safe bet, especially in a blend of humour and horror. Here, innocent yet secretly powerful Lily (elfin Cailee Spaeny, Pacific Rim: Uprising), teams-up with hopefuls Frankie, Lourdes, and Tabby, to engage in time-frozen hi-jinks, and turning a school-bully into super-woke teen, for oddly cringing amusement, and then facing a creepy sleepwalking lurker, until a tragedy is caused by apparently irresponsible behaviour. What if the stereotype of legacy is actually a curse?
Michelle Monaghan and David Duchovny sketch out a rather blatantly mismatched couple struggling to raise a troublesome joint-family pack of stroppy or sulky, or adopted, teens. Social problems are highlighted keenly by random frictions between the politics of liberal philosophy and more strident binary-thinking disorders within both domestic settings and classrooms. At times, a zealously queer-friendly agenda threatens to overwhelm a chaos of familiar genre elements (reworking scenes from the original movie), and this unsteady balancing of interconnected themes remains shaky entertainment right up to the anticipated ending.
Whether wiccan or pagan, the competing groups are obviously dysfunctional, and grossly unsavoury themes of patriarchy against sisterhood, occasionally treated as black-comedy in a soap opera framing, eventually build-up to a special effects sequence of cult versus coven action. Exit stage left, but with a weirdo twist, has long since become fairly typical of remakes, and so it is with The Craft: Legacy, as Balk gets a welcome cameo.
