The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 17-23
The Craft (1996)
Directed by Andrew Fleming
Witchcraft becomes a metaphor for drugs in this conservatively cautionary 90s camp favorite. Sure, it starts out as a little goofy fun—some levitation, love spells and… heart attacks?!—but pretty rapidly becomes a gateway into more serious shit, from attempted date rape to defenestration. These are the antics of a wristcutter from San Francisco (Robin Tunney), who moves to Los Angeles and quickly falls in with a coven of Catholic schoolgirls—a threesome the great Skeet Ulrich calls “the bitches of Eastwick.” They self-identify as the weirdos that girls their age are supposed to watch out for, the ones their classmates avoid while roaming their California high school, a sunny al fresco setting familiar from Clueless and Scream and 90210.
But director–cowriter Fleming puts a goth-girl spin on this quasitropical milieu, even though only one member of this sisterhood really has boy problems (the one, incidentally, who’s also stalked by snakes): that old thing where you don’t sleep with him, but he tells everyone you did? The rest suffer other adolescent troubles: Neve Campbell’s body is covered in burns, and the medical treatments are painful (which… I guess some teenagers can relate to); Rachel True is bullied by some seriously racist bitches who call her a “negroid”; and Fairuza Balk lives in a trailer with a lowlife stepdad and alcoholic mom. The witchcraft lets them escape these problems, even to solve them, if only to replace them with a bunch of others that are way worse. As the proprietor of the local spell shop tells them, there’s no such thing as “black” or “white” magic—only what’s in the witch’s heart. It’s just like how some people get high to have a little fun, and others do it to destroy themselves—and everyone around them. Henry Stewart (February 21, 6:45pm at BAM’s “Witches’ Brew”)