The Craft

THE CRAFT
(R, Columbia Pictures, 101 mins., theatrical release date: May 3, 1996)

Texas Frightmare Weekend 2015 is approaching fast, and I've been keeping up with the guest announcements and such. This is one of the most high-profile events in the three years I have attended, having missed seven previous conventions. The first year I went, I guess the biggest draw was Danny "Machete" Trejo, who packed such a crowd that I remember Mariel Hemingway referred to the line outside his photo op as the "Trejo 500." I wasn't in that line, honestly, as it was conflicting with my date with a princess...

Ahem.

But year two upped the ante in that it featured a full-scale gathering of personnel from the Terminator series, including Linda Hamilton, Robert Patrick, Michael Biehn, Kristanna Loken, and Earl Boen. Even Hamilton's tormentors from the same year's Children of the Corn, John "Isaac" Franklin and Courtney "Malachai" Gains, were in attendance. I had a great time at that event, too, mostly because I spent it with a friend I made the previous year. And whilst I understood that the potential to top even that star-studded weekend celebration was possible, I had no idea what the 2015 roster would bring.

Suffice it to say, 2015 has done the same thing 2013 did in the presence of Diane Franklin: it has awakened the teenager in me.

I say that because the year marks the debut convention appearances of some of the biggest names from my 1990s childhood, particularly Neve Campbell and Skeet Ulrich, as in "Sidney Prescott and Billy Loomis from Scream." But you don't have to be Ghost Face to recognize that these two had made an earlier splash in 1996 before Wes Craven's self-effacing horror blockbuster laid bare the rules of horror both past and future. You don't even have to know who fellow first-time attendee Rachel True is, but it helps, because 2015 is when that old black magic comes to Dallas in anticipation of the 20th anniversary of The Craft.

Before Scream author Kevin Williamson archly intertwined John Hughes (The Breakfast Club) and Fred Dekker (Night of the Creeps) in the Robert Rodriguez-helmed The Faculty, The Craft stood out as the decade's most recognizable high school spookshow by injecting voodoo into the sardonic teen angst formula. This could charitably be called "Hexers," except that the central clique in this film aren't idle rich snobs but outcasts from the word go, a brooding collective of female misfits whom their callous peers have christened "The Bitches of Eastwick."

Or at least that's how Ulrich's Chris Hooker describes them to the new girl in town, Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney), freshly relocated to Los Angeles from San Francisco. Sullen Sarah carries the trauma of a mother who died giving birth as well as suicidal slashes down her wrists, and is now forced to make a fresh start at St. Benedict's Academy, a parochial school just as ripe with classism and cruelty as any non-uniformed establishment. Sarah gravitates towards the terrifying trio, regardless, after nonchalantly demonstrating her powers during French class.

Chris will go on to slander Sarah as punishment for her not putting out, thus giving her all the reason to devote herself full-time to the supernatural machinations of her black sheep BFFs. They all seem to lack proper self-esteem for various reasons. Grand high Goth Nancy Downs (Fairuza Balk) has a sluttish reputation of her own and lives in a trailer with her alky mom and deadbeat stepfather. Meek Bonnie (Neve Campbell) has burn scars down her backside from a traumatic accident, whilst Rochelle (Rachel True) is the lone Negro student and susceptible to the catty insults of the mean blonde from Night of the Demons 2.

Séances and slumber parties ensue, with such ritualistic bonding exercises as blood oaths, beauty makeovers and the ever-popular "Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board." All in the name of Manon, an all-powerful, all-natural deity who is described through analogy as the stadium God and the Devil would play football on. The girls pray their troubles away, and Manon hears them, and so, in quick succession, Bonnie's damaged skin tissue regenerates, Rochelle's racist bully develops female pattern baldness and Nancy goes from poor to posh after willing her penniless, perverted stepfather into a stroke and inheriting his life insurance funds.

All's well for them and for the audience, as The Craft fancies itself a playfully macabre twist on teenaged fantasy for a spell, or until the spell wears off. The conflict begins when the increasingly resentful Nancy decides she wants invoke Manon directly through a beachside bonfire and demand his almighty powers. The next morning, she walks on water as various aquatic mammals die on the sandy turf, all the while she screeches that these are her "gifts." Sarah is rightly perturbed, but her self-centered friends remain blissfully ignorant. And when Sarah's own wish to have Chris wrapped around her finger goes horrifically awry, Nancy takes it upon herself to get even by murdering him.

Gradually, The Craft reveals itself to be another grasp at slick, superficial morality from the ham-fingered writer of Flatliners. The naturally-crafted Sarah is elevated to Good Witch status as Nancy, tempting irony by the casting of ex-Disney child star Fairuza Balk, devolves into The Even Worse Than Worst Witch. And the two other girls are stripped of their integrity and rendered ditzy foot soldiers. This banal development compromises whatever slivers of rebellion and wit the film has accumulated, a celluloid sacrifice of the soul.

Flatliners at least allowed its bratty principals the divine method of closure, something Peter Filardi and co-writer/director Andrew Fleming push aside here for cheap tricks. Rochelle, in particular, is egregiously short-changed by the film's formulaic forthrightness. Part of that is down to the casting of Rachel True, who looks way too sophisticated and smart to play the fourth banana in a juvie horror film (and for good reason, as she was pushing 30). There comes a point in the film where Rochelle should arrive at the same epiphanies as Sarah, having seen the devastation her vengeance has wrought on Laura Lizzie. But when the film approaches some kind of intriguing opportunity for a truce, it fails to follow through, turning the focus over instead to the nutty Nancy.

Neve Campbell's Bonnie is undermined just as poorly. Right at the moment her confidence is restored and she is allowed to morph from Basket Case to Princess, Filardi & Fleming treat her sex appeal as a sign of snobbishness, with nothing in the script aside from the most innocuous one-liner (late for school, she sasses "Sorry, my pedicure ran late") to demonstrate this personality shift. This is no less one-dimensionally prissy than the attitudes of straw villains Laura and Chris, and speaks to the thudding, finger-wagging desire to shame which constantly reduces most teen films to rank hypocrisy.

The lead actresses as a unit demonstrate charisma the film doesn't fully capitalize on, with the possible exception of Fairuza Balk's vamp/tramp volatility. Balk's bee-stung sneer and outrageous overbite are impossible to deny as she devours the scenery with as much relish as this story eats its tail. The sensuous, green-eyed Robin Tunney works hard to compensate for the film's compromised intelligence, but even she cannot save The Craft from the perfunctory prophecy which is a prolonged siege confrontation replete with pools of maggots and miles of snakes, followed by a misguided coda which renders its characters as unsociably sour as their stigma suggested.

Like Joel Schumacher before him, Andrew Fleming relies on visual panache and trendy flash as the be-all-end-all. There is an extravagant, earthy texture to Alexander Gruszynski's cinematography which also meshes well with the digital FX work used for levitation and catching butterflies. Fleming has a liberal fluidity with the camera, and combined with Jeff Freeman's editing and the sound design, the centerpiece séance is the most bewitching moment of The Craft, so to speak.

Graeme Revell's score stings and swoons admirably, but is engulfed by the alt-rock song selection which teases Juliana Hatfield, Matthew Sweet and Jewel at best, and overemphasizes a handful of poor cover versions at worst. The film begins with Our Lady Peace's grungy, garbled take on The Beatles' "Tomorrow Never Knows" and ends with Heather Nova listlessly draining the human touch from Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch." The makers of Charmed must have seen this and loved Love Spit Love's anemic retread of The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?" though. Maybe Charmed was the unofficial spin-off of The Craft the way Friends was meant to be "Singles: The Series"?

"Whatever!" seems like the right response, as The Craft labors under the pretense of authenticity to the Wiccan faith (the threefold karmic comeuppances in favor of "Do onto others...") but is grossly conformist at heart. Its rushed-upon-the-blade apathy is its tragedy, and although it is undemanding fun in the right setting, it does not honestly achieve the kind of magic which has kept it in cult circles for nearly two decades. E.C. Comics don't take themselves as seriously as The Craft double toils to.

Night of the Demons 2

NIGHT OF THE DEMONS 2
(R, Republic Pictures, 96 mins., limited theatrical release date: May 13, 1994)

Do you remember the three signs of demonic possession as outlined in a certain 1980s horror cult film? No, they do not involve water, sunlight and late night foodie calls, I've moved on from Joe Dante films for the time being. No, I'm talking about infestation from beyond the grave, Satanism and the human body as medium for the morbidly deceased. There are three warning signs you need to know if you ever hope to escape a haunted house post haste.

The noise is the first one, preferably the loud shriek of a teenage girl startled by some apparitional premonition visible only to her eyes, the kind which provokes easy cynicism from the hormonal heathens of the world. Yeah, the shriek may be no cause for real alarm, but then there's the chill. As cold as the touch of the Reaper himself, the kind whose only security blanket is one procured for a dirt nap. But death is too late to make similes for, you realize, and thus you take a deep breath through your nose only to catch a whiff of Hell on earth. The foulest stench is in the air, the funk of 40,000 years, and grisly gh...

I'm sorry, I got a little carried away there. No mere mortal can resist a "Thriller" joke. It's human nature, I tell you.

The point is that the noise, the stink and the chill are things which occur in a precise order and constitute the danger of demonic possession. It's advice that the new batch of doomed youths in Night of the Demons 2 should have picked up on before they wind up in Hull House, the infamous slaughter mill where Angela Franklin and friends threw the Halloween party which ended them all.

And by them, of course, I mean it ended Angela and her friends. Or did it?!

Because Amelia Kinkade is back in black bridal garb as Angela and she wants to celebrate her inevitable return to the corporeal world. Sadly, none of her old friends want to come back in limbo, so Linnea Quigley is out of the picture. And the original's director, Kevin Tenney, is also not on the guest list. However, reprising their positions from the last film are writer Joe Augustyn, producer Walter Josten, cinematographer David Lewis, and special effects designer Steve Johnson, so it's not all that mercenary. And yet every party needs a proper planner, so who is the man to take charge of "Night of the Demons 2: Angela's Revenge," so to speak?

Enter Brian Trenchard-Smith, an Englishman who went on to corner the market for Ozploitation from the mid-1970s onward. Critical consensus dictated that Trenchard-Smith comes from the Land Down Under not just geographically, but also aesthetically, until Mark Hartley's giddy Not Quite Hollywood gave the filmmaker a ringing endorsement from Quentin Tarantino and sincere love for the likes of Stunt Rock and Dead End Drive-In, which I also recommend. The 1990s saw him transition into American B-cinema, specifically the straight-to-video sequel mill which led him to Night of the Demons 2 as well as Leprechaun 3 & 4.

Yes, he was the man who brought you a demented dwarf from Ireland bursting out of a horny space traveler's kiwis a la Alien while quipping "Always wear protection."

There is plenty of phallic humor to go around in Night of the Demons 2, which owes as much to the Porky's school of horny hi-jinks as it does to its 1988 progenitor. The male heroes are introduced peeking through binoculars at the neighboring bedrooms of their lady co-eds, thus ensuring the film's Hard-R credentials. Flirtation involves a basketball which dribbles up towards a miniskirt with magnetic force. The baddest of the bad girls herein has heaving bosoms which allow for easy demonic access to attack the nearest lech. And once the horror kicks in, it's easy to go Freudian with the many snakes and tentacles which lash out in anger.

Caught in the middle of all the kinky chaos is Angela's biological sister, Melissa (Merle Kennedy), the designated Carrie White of St. Rita's Academy, a Catholic boarding school run by Father Rob (Rod McCary) and Sister Gloria (Jennifer Rhodes). Rob is a bit more liberal in his attitudes toward reformation than the strict Gloria, demanding that the students have more input into the upcoming Halloween social than Gloria prefers. Not only that, but Sister Gloria has a...well, habit of interfering with the throes of young lust by waving her trusty yardstick in between the students and commanding, "Save a little room for the Holy Ghost."

The campus alpha bitch Shirley (Zoe Trilling), though, defies Gloria by using her banishment from the dance to convince her girlfriends, including Melissa "Mouse" Franklin, to have their own party at infamous Hull House, the last known whereabouts of Angela. The poor orphaned cadet is made the brunt of a cruel stunt involving a virgin sacrifice, but the wicked spirit of Angela intervenes by hiding within a lipstick tube which fans of the original will know where it's been. The students make it back to St. Rita's, allowing Angela the freedom to come alive and wreak havoc among the student body.

Whereas the original Night of the Demons offered a scenario straight out of The Evil Dead, the sequel takes some of its cues from the gonzo school of splatter comedy in the vein of Peter Jackson where the more the messier. The demons in this film are treated more accordingly to the rules of vampire lore, easily dispatched with holy water and melting down into puddles of goop. In undeath, an athlete's severed head can be used as a basketball and Angela can transmogrify to adapt to any scenario, emerging even as a serpent. And there's a little Dead-Alive in Sister Gloria by making her kick ass for the Lord, although there's no explanation given for how she can overcome her own decapitation when she is not one of the demons. Are we supposed to accept her as an angel?

At least Jennifer Rhodes (of Slumber Party Massacre II and Heathers) has a field day with her performance, as do McCory's skeptical minister (a nod to Stir Crazy, perhaps?) and Bobby Jacoby (the prankster kid from Tremors) as freckle-faced demonology obsessive Perry, who makes a case for being the missing Frog Brother. On the opposite end, Cristi Harris gets the film's most warming character as Bibi, Mouse's lone teenage ally who manages to have premarital sex and survive, and there's Christine Taylor, the future Mrs. Ben Stiller, getting called "Marcia" by one of the jerky boys as the vapid Terri. Clearly, she was going places. Also in the cast are Darin Heames, the circumcision victim from Dr. Giggles, as giggling sadist Z-Boy and Johnny Moran & Ladd York as the nominal but not loathable Everydude heroes.

But as is always the case, the villain is the main reason to watch, and "Mimi" Kinkade gets to indulge both her Rue McClanahan lineage and dancing pedigree as the wicked Angela. Whether taunting a pair of missionaries with a cake party at the start of the film or doing a reprisal of her sultry "Stigmata Martyr" showcase later on, she makes a deliciously feminine counterpoint to the wannabe Freddy Kruegers of the horror world.

Your enjoyment of the film depends ultimately upon your nostalgic reserves for the adolescent T&A  comedies and/or the equally puerile Video Nasties from the 1980s. Brian Trenchard-Smith doesn't exactly come close to either Peter Jackson or Stuart Gordon in his disreputable hand, but he doesn't stand in the way of the cheap thrills and is all the more respectable for it. Maybe I should credit him less for the blatant use of stock footage from Tenney's film, but the film is far too much of a lark to be shocking. Night of the Demons 2 stakes its own claim as a good-time bad movie which might not stand up to repeat viewings, but it walks tall and swings a mean rosary. I'll take it over any of the Leprechaun movies.