BEFORE: Full disclosure - I taped this to put on a DVD with "The Sorcerer's Apprentice", and I must have confused it with the film "Little Witches", which I'd seen before. So I've now realized that this film is in the collection, and I've never seen it. I got lucky with the linking tonight, since character actor Vincent Schiavelli from "Lord of Illusions" was also in "Valmont" with Fairuza Balk (last seen in "The Waterboy"). If I hadn't noticed that, I would have had to link from Famke Janssen to Salma Hayek through "The Faculty", and from Hayek to Neve Campbell through "54".
THE PLOT: A newcomer to a Catholic prep high school falls in with a trio of outcast teenage girls who practice witchcraft and they conjure up various spells and curses against those who anger them.
AFTER: Geez, that's a good summary from the IMDB - tells you everything you need to know, and you (almost) don't even need to watch the movie after reading that!
The film opens with a cover of the Beatles song "Tomorrow Never Knows", performed by Our Lady Peace - so that got my attention right off. (covers of The Cars song "Dangerous Type" and Peter Gabriel's "I Have the Touch" are also heard later on) And the film is the story of 4 parochial school girls having sleepovers and experimenting with magic. OK, I'm really paying attention now...
But, it wasn't enough to hold my interest for very long. These girls got into the witchcraft game to get in touch with nature, but ended up using the spells to make themselves look prettier, get the attention of boys, and get revenge on the "mean girls" in school. Umm, don't they then become the mean girls themselves? See, they're not even self-aware enough to realize that. Petty bitches. I mean, witches.
Things go awry when their spells start to actually work - making a boy into one girl's love-slave, making the hair of one girl's enemy fall out. That girl was a racist, you see, so she deserves to lose her beauty (I guess), but if a cause-effect relationship between the two things isn't pointed out, how's she supposed to make the connection and realize the error of her ways? A better revenge would have been to cause some kind of tanning accident that would have made her skin really dark, then maybe she'd get it.
Unfortunately, one girl's wish was to have all the power of Manon, supposedly the big cheese in the magic world, without realizing that a person isn't supposed to have that much power. So she goes a little crazy, and the new girl has to become a "true witch" to put her in her place.
Eh, I lost interest about halfway through. Can't believe there's no porn version of this one - there's a porn version of "The Facts of Life", for chrissakes.
Also starring Robin Tunney (last seen in "The Darwin Awards"), Rachel True, Skeet Ulrich (last seen in "Armored"), Christine Taylor (last seen in "License to Wed"), Breckin Meyer (also last seen in "54"), with a cameo from Helen Shaver (last seen in "The Color of Money").
RATING: 3 out of 10 spellbooks
SPOOK-O-METER: 6 out of 10. Lots of creepy things - snakes, rats, and cock-a-roaches.
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