The Craft (1996)

The Craft is a lot of fun. In fact, for a horror movie aimed at teenaged girls it's probably more fun than many people expected it to be. I used to love it. Rewatching it nowadays, however, reminds me of just how light and fluffy it all is. There are dark moments, undeniably, but a lot of the movie plays out like an extended episode of My First Coven (or My Little Crony, if you will). I still enjoy it, and it's so much better than any post-millennial horror movies aimed at teenage girls that I can think of, but it has, pardon the pun, lost some of its charm.

Robin Tunney plays Sarah, the new girl in town, a girl who eventually finds acceptance from a trio comprised of Neve Campbell, Rachel True and their nominal leader, Fairuza Balk. It turns out that the three girls have been just waiting for a fourth. They dabble in witchcraft, you see, and with the right fourth person they could really tap into some strong stuff. Or so they hope. As it turns out, they're correct. What starts off as a bit of fun - revenge against a bully, a love spell - soon turns darker and more dangerous. Sarah decides that enough is enough, but the other three girls have other ideas. If Sarah isn't with them . . . . . . . . . then she's against them.

Mixing in some witchcraft with standard teen fare, The Craft has one major plus point going for it, two if you count the decent, for the time, special effects, and that's the cast. Robin Tunney is actually the weakest member of the cast, but does okay in the main role. The second weakest member of the cast is Neve Campbell, unconvincing as a young woman who has spent so many years dealing with some major scar tissue all over her body before finding a way to look beautiful and feel confident. Rachel True is quite good, always convincing as someone genuinely conflicted by the power being used by the group, and both Christine Taylor and Skeet Ulrich are enjoyable as two very different kinds of assholes. Breckin Meyer is fun to watch, but he's only in a couple of scenes and only doing the schtick that he's done in almost every other movie that he's starred in. Then there's Fairuza Balk. Balk is fantastic throughout, it's hard to take your eyes off her. She's one of the most interesting, and fun, villains to be found in any horror movie from the '90s. You just know that her background isn't a warm and happy one, a lot of her behaviour is made up of standard defence mechanisms, but she still has good intentions even when things start turning bad.

Director Andrew Fleming doesn't take any risks, but he does just fine with the pacing of the movie and the various set-pieces. The runtime is approximately 100 minutes, the story is set up very quickly and there aren't too many moments that feel as if they're just padding. Mind you, this may be due more to the fact that Peter Filardi wrote a relatively fat-free script sprinkled with some good one-liners.

It may go without saying, but fans of Charmed will want to check this one out. And fans of teen movies that are given a hint of darkness. Oh, and fans of Fairuza Balk.

6/10

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Craft-DVD-Robin-Tunney/dp/B000050GQ7/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382040150&sr=8-1&keywords=the+craft

Carnosaur 2 (1995)

In case you haven't seen Carnosaur, or have been lucky enough to wipe it from your memory, here is my review of it here (0 out of 4 people found that useful, oh woe is me). For those wanting to get up to speed without going through any unnecessary pain, here is the briefest synopsis - someone went out of their way to recreate dinosaurs and that led to a number of scenes in which a puppet was shown with lots of fhasling lights behind it whenever it would attack someone. Things built up to a finale in which the puppet had to be dealt with, of course.

Carnosaur 2 might follow on from the first movie but you wouldn't really know that while watching the film. It works just fine as a standalone film - there's a throwaway line or two explaining the science behind the thing but that's about it. In fact, I can't even recall if the main character mentioned anything that linked specifically to the first movie so perhaps the only link would be dinosaur puppets.

Okay, okay, I'm being a bit harsh there. The dinosaurs are made to look a bit better this time around but that's the only improvement. The plot sees a bunch of folk that it's hard to care for investigating a mystery that isn't a mystery at an abandoned facility. People start to get picked off and then the truth comes out that there might be some dinosaurs in the facility. Oh dear.

Directed by Louis Morneau, and written by Michael Palmer, Carnosaur 2 loses the sense of fun that the first film had. Oh, the first film was bad but it was bad in an enjoyable way. This one even misses that mark and is just bad. We get the usual low-budget setting with no invention to provide any variety, an awful script and a cast of far-from-A-listers.

It's always good to see Miguel A. Nunez Jr. onscreen, no matter how small his role, so that's a small plus that makes up for having to spend time with John Savage, Cliff De Young, Don Stroud, Rick Dean, Ryan Thomas Johnson and even the pretty Arabella Holzbog. They're not awful but the individual below-average ability seems to join together and form one great pool of soul-sapping . . . . . . . . rubbish.

If you fancy seeing something that has some cheap dinosaur effects in it, a mixed bag of actors and a number of moments that will provide you with unintentional hilarity then see the first movie. If you fancy torturing yourself, as I often do, then see this one.

3/10

http://www.amazon.com/Carnosaur-2-John-Savage/dp/B000087F29/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1351025266&sr=8-2&keywords=carnosaur+2