This flick has a very standard teen-movie formula. It's like Airbourne or Hackers, except instead of rollerblading and hacking, it's witch craft. The protagonist, Sarah, is the new girl in school. She butts heads with the bad crowd and then eventually joins their gang until the final showdown in the end. The leader of the coven is Nancy, played by Fairuza Balk. She got that ugly-hott going on. I always had a crush on her. She looks like the kind of trashy girl who can shot-gun a beer. There's some mondo continuity errors in the characters of this movie. For example, Sarah freaks out when her friends' spells and hi-jinx get a couple people killed. She no longer wants to be part of their club. But why would this bother her? At the beginning of the movie, a homeless person is nailed with a car, and they're laughing and celebrating because they think they made it happen with a spell. This is how they become friends in the first place: by killing a dude.One of the witches, Rochelle, starts to feel really guilty about putting a curse on some babe-zilla bully that causes all her hair to fall out. She shows no remorse, however, for any of the deaths and she has no qualms with trying to kill Sarah and her entire family at the end of the movie. It's like the writer of this script has ADD so bad that he can't even pay attention to his own writing. He forgot what he wrote one page ago as he pulls this whole thing out of his butt. This movie is pretty cheesy, but I feel it could be cheesier. I probably just don't get it because I'm a boy. Maybe if Van Damme were in it, I'd like it more.

I wanted to watch this film because Halloween is coming up so I was like, why not try watch it now and might as well get deep inside into the world of witchcraft. However this film wasn't exciting as I would hoped! It just didn't really give me what I wanted like the story slipped straight away when Sarah left the group and the other three girls became such physios into killing her. I mean woah woah woah, what in the world is freaking going on here? This isn't what should happen for god sake, what were they thinking of just messing up the story? I honestly thought this was gonna be a good film but no, I was wrong! I'm so disappointed, this movie left me disappointed!

'The Craft' is not as painfully 90s as I'd feared, but the phantom of Lollapalooza is hiding in every plaid clad shadow, like Tabitha Soren waiting to pounce on you like you're Eddie Vedder getting off a tour bus. In some ways, it might actually have benefited from some well placed 90s zeitgeist.It's a competently directed film with very solid special f/x for its time, but it's really the young quartet of talented lead actresses who carry the movie, such as it is. Particularly the lovely goth goddess Fairuza Balk, who chews through scenery in the third act like a rabid beaver.

I wanted to like The Craft more than I do. It has lots of appealing ingredients, including a pretty solid main cast and a story with lots of potential that puts young women front and center. I think my issues with it come down to tone and pacing. There are plenty of scenes that feel very natural and organic, especially those that feature the four main girls together; and then there are jarring scenes (for example, the vagrant with the snake) that seem to come from a different movie. Many of the adults (or, at least, the older actors playing adult roles, as opposed to the adult actors playing teenagers) are somewhat off, including Tunney's father and Assumpta Serna as the owner of the Wicca shop. Helen Shaver, as Fairuza Balk's trashy mother, gives the only performance that meshes well with what the teenagers are doing. Balk herself, though she excels at bringing menacing tension and unpredictability to her performance as the most unhinged of the four main girls, sometimes goes overboard with the histrionics, such as the bedroom scene with Skeet Ulrich at the party. The other girls' -- Robin Tunney, Neve Campbell and Rachel True -- performances stay more grounded through the movie, even as the increasingly unnatural events unfold. (Campbell and Ulrich, who would co-star as high school paramours in a film, Scream, that overshadowed this movie, don't have much interaction here, but I thought Ulrich was actually better -- and certainly funnier -- here as the bewitched, bothered and bewildered wanna-be boyfriend of Tunney.)All in all, the film feels like it wasn't thought through as thoroughly as it could have been. There are intriguing, post-Carrie ideas here about witchcraft and paganism as metaphors for girls' sexual development, but they don't really go anywhere even as the girls become more sexualized (and their skirts get shorter) as they become more confident in their craft. There are elements that feel forced or blunt -- such as the over-the-top overt racism shoved in True's character's face -- when a subtler approach would have been more effective and believable. There are the jarring tonal shifts that make me feel like director Andrew Fleming didn't have complete mastery of his own material. (Fleming also co-wrote the screenplay.) This is still a reasonably entertaining film with some effective scenes, memorable imagery and good performances. In more skillful hands or with more time and money, it could have been much more than that.