My Review of The Craft: Legacy (2020)

 

Written And Directed by Zoe Lister-Jones

Lily (to Adam): "Now its you who's gonna burn."

As a 90s kid, I absolutely loved The Craft and before finally settling down to watch this, movie that I've been putting off for a year, I went and watched the original. For me, it naturally still holds up. For this movie, it also meant that the comparisons were going to be inevitable.

This movie flits between wanting to be a reboot but by the end of it, it ended up becoming a sequel to the 1996 cult classic. Both ideas are sound. They even work well together. If the first movie was a produce of it's time, this one certainly is as well. Though whether or not it will garner the positive legacy of what came before is probably less likely.

Shy girl Lily Schechner (Cailee Spaeny) and her mother, Helen (Michelle Monaghan) move in with the latter's new boyfriend, Adam Harrison (David Duchovny) and the latter's sons, Jacob (Charles Vandervaart), Isaiah (Donald MacLean Jr) and Abe (Julien Grey). Soon enough, Lily's in a new high school and soon makes enemies with Timmy (Nicholas Galitzene) but also some new friends as well.

The friends in question being witches Frankie (Gideon Adlon), Lourdes (Zoey Luna) and Tabby (Lovie Simone). When they realise that Lily is their fourth and a natural born witch, the foursome soon connect and put their newfound abilities to the test. Needless to say that Timmy becomes the first recipient of the girls magic.

Timmy in a lot of ways mirrors Chris from the original movie but things do take an interesting turn with him. While I think the movie should've avoided the near romance angle with Lily, it was intriguing to reveal the character as bisexual as well as his own interest in the supernatural. However for a movie that professes to be woke, it did commit the cardinal sin of killing off one of it's two LGBT characters. 

The wokeness in question definitely can be a source of contention for the movie, only because sometimes it feels like the movie cant decide between taking the woke stuff seriously or outright parodying it. Despite some truly cringy dialogue in parts, the movie does a decent job in making the central characters likable enough as they come into their powers.

As for the baddie of the piece - yup, it's toxic masculinity encapsulated in Adam, who's actually a psycho warlock wanting to steal Lily's powers. Of course he underestimated the power of four and did not live to tell the tale. In terms of battles, it's a bit more simplistic than the one we had with Sarah and Nancy in the original.

Speaking of Nancy, the link that this movie has to the original is that Nancy was revealed to be Lily's biological mother and that Helen had an agreement of sorts never to tell Lily about her. It was nice to see Fairuza Balk reprise the role for the last scene of the movie bur considering the numbers this movie didn't make, I don't know if we'll ever a continuation of this set up.

- Props to the movie for having a trans character with Lourdes and not shying away from the character bring trans.

-  This movie had an international release but also went to video on demand.

- Standout music: I'm going with Alanis Morissette Hand In My Pocket. The rest of the music wad not good.

- Chronology: I'm going to assume 2020 to match with the time of this movie, though Lily repeatedly kept using a polaroid camera to take selfies.

The Craft: Legacy is an oddity of a film. It's nowhere near as good as the first movie and white a lot of the 'wokeness' will likely put people off, it's actually not as bad as I had expected it to be. The main characters are decent enough, the link to the first movie while a bit tacked on does mostly work and if by some miracle, it manages to get a follow up of sorts, it has stuff it can work with. Not a total disaster but definitely not a classic.

Rating: 6 out of 10

My Review of The Craft (1996)

Written by Peter Filardi And Andrew Fleming
Directed by Andrew Fleming

Nancy: "What's going on? Why aren't you dead?"
Sarah: "Manon. He came to me. Saved me. Oh, and by the way. He wanted me to give you a message. You're in big shit. He says you've abused the gifts that he's given you, and now you're going to have to pay the price."

With Halloween around the corner, the next few days I'm going to do some appropriate reviews and one of my favourite movies from the late 1990s was this witching delight as four outcast teenage girls bond and eventually clash over their use of magic and invoking the spirit of Manon to boot.

The girls in question include cynical goth Nancy (Fairuza Balk), newly arrived to LA, Sarah (Robin Tunney) swimmer Rochelle (Rachel True) and scarred Bonnie (Neve Campbell) - the four of whom get deeper and deeper into the art of magic, first with some small spells and then others resulting in death and a nasty fellow student losing her hair.

The big story in the movie however was the power dynamic between Nancy and Sarah. It seemed subtle at first but it's really there from the moment the two of them interact as the former succumbs to the darker side of things while the latter - the more naturally gifted witch is forced into conquering some deep seated fears in order to save herself and overthrow Nancy too.

Out of the four main characters, it is the rivalry and contrasts between Sarah and Nancy that fuel the movie and the way it at times impact both Bonnie and Rochelle. It's a superbly cast movie with some truly terrific performances from both Tunney and Balk and it certainly has tackled witchcraft far better than more recent movies.

The rest of the characters though don't have much to do, other than fill in certain tropes or in Chris's case also get killed off in a suitably nasty way by Nancy but given the charms off the four leading ladies, I really don't find that much of a bad thing to be honest.

- Needless to say, a remake of this movie is currently being planned.
- Fairuza Balk is (or was) a Wiccan in real life while this movie was being made.
- Prior to it being the theme for Charmed, the Smiths song How Soon Is Now was used in this movie.
- During the invocation scene we see Nancy with a snake, Sarah with a budgie, Bonnie with a butterfly and Rochelle with a clown fish.

One of my favourite movies and certainly one with one of the more darker takes on witchcraft, The Craft is a superb movie, led brilliantly by all four actresses in question and in my honest opinion, something of an underrated gem as well.

Rating: 8 out of 10