SPOILERS FOR A RECENTLY RELEASED MOVIE

BUT VIDEO ON DEMAND IS PRETTY EXPENSIVE, SO WERE YOU ACTUALLY PLANNING ON WATCHING THIS ANY TIME SOON?

Alright! A day late, but we’re here! The long-awaited sequel to The Craft! I’m sure somebody wanted this, right? Anyway, 24 years later we have a… sequel? Soft reboot? An Evil Dead II of a movie. But how is it? Is this a movie that needed to be made? I’ll get to that eventually.

Lily and her mom are moving in with… I guess her mom’s internet boyfriend? It’s weird that they’re moving in when Lily has met Adam (Mr. David Duchovny) only once or twice before. Anyway, Adam has 3 sons but they don’t matter. At school Lily has a bad period that bleeds through her pants (reminiscent of Carrie) and while most of the school laughs at her, three teen witches decide to be nice. They have names, but gun to my head I couldn’t tell you what they were outside of looking on IMDB. So now they’re a coven of 4 witches, each girl tied heavily one of the four classical elements because that’s a thing. They use magic to make Lily’s primary bully a socially woke dude, and he kisses her after she… it sure looked like she was using his jacket to masturbate under her covers, but we later find out it was a sort of love spell. He kills himself the next day. The other girls are horrified at Lily’s abuse of magic–even though she’s been a witch for something like 3 days–and bind her power as well as their own. Lily finds out she’s adopted around this time, too. Her mom reveals that she knows about Lily’s magic and offers to take it from her, but surprise! That was actually Adam using a glamor! Adam is a men’s right activist AND a warlock! He abducts Lily for… reasons and wants her power for… other reasons. Meanwhile, the former bully contacts the other girls from beyond the grave to say that he was murdered, and they unbind their powers and rush to Lily. By our powers combined they defeat Adam, burning him alive. We then have a cameo by Fairuza Balk as Nancy Downs–still institutionalized–as we find out she’s Lily’s birth mom.

I can see what this movie was trying to do, but holy hell did it not succeed. The PG-13 rating drags the movie down, making it feel like a Disney-fied version of the original. Adam as the villain just feels… wrong. The Craft was a movie with strong female characters and final conflict that directly involved those ladies and their interplay. Here the big bad is a guy who talks over women and thinks they’re beneath him, but we don’t get confirmation of his toxic beliefs until the very end. Adam’s three sons have absolutely no use and are kind of forgotten at the end. Are Lily and her mom still living in their house? Who knows! Then the conflict of Lily abusing her powers was super forced and contrived. You three gave her the Cliff’s notes on how to be a witch and are mad when she makes a mistake? It’s a surprise even to the audience suggesting that the former bully’s mind couldn’t handle two spells placed on him at once. But that could’ve worked! I kept waiting for the consequences of their actions to bite them on the ass, and this would’ve been a great example! But no, he was murdered. There are no negative consequences for casting a spell that rewrote someone’s mind, and no complications about using magic too much.

And, uh… speaking of dubious consent… when did Nancy get pregnant? If the movie takes place roughly in real time–24 years after the first film–and Lily is high school aged, that means that Lily was conceived while Nancy was institutionalized. I mean, she still is in a facility, but she’s not strapped down anymore and the cameo is so brief we don’t have a feel for her mental state. Basically I’m saying that there is some real problematic implications in ensuring that this movie’s subtitle of Legacy made sense, and the spirit of the woke dead bi guy would absolutely agree with me.

Previous: The Craft

---

Follow Me Elsewhere

• WordPress
• Twitter
• Facebook