The Craftettes

As a female who was 14 in 1996, I consider virtually every day of the year the right time to watch The Craft. Imagine my glee then to discover that way back when Fairuza Balk was pulling her hair and Robin Tunney was rocking a strawberry blond wig, a small studio financed a quickie Catholic schoolgirls-turn-to-Satan movie starring Clea DuVall and Jennifer Rubin as a nun in a fanny pack.

A NUN IN A FANNY PACK!

Quick Plot: After a black mass-y prologue, we’re sent to the present (or really 1990s version of it) where a girls' Catholic school is about to relax for Easter break. A gaggle of students stay behind due to the typically Harry Potter-esque reasons of being orphans, having rich parents that don’t want them around, or trying to avoid abusive dads that have birthed a very dangerous habit of masturbating during confessional.

Said girl with the habit of touching herself during Lord's Prayers is Jamie, played with full panache by an often naked Sheeri Rappaport. As you might guess, it’s Jamie, the girl who performs a topless striptease in front of her window to an audience of uniformly attractive construction workers who ends up falling hardest for Lucifer’s charms. If you’d like, we can henceforth refer to this character as Fairuza Two.

Rooming with Fairuza Two is a goody two-shoes Stanford hopeful named Faith (or Robin Tunney Two Point Oh, if you’d prefer) who has the handy skill of reading fluent Latin and the inconvenient drawback of being a fairly terrible actress, at least during the apparent two-week shoot time of Little Witches. Like me, actress Mimi Rose speaks too loudly, which, as you might expect, IS QUITE ANNOYING (now I know how everyone I converse with feels; sorry guys). She’s also taxed with the dullest role and paired with a hunky (at first) virginal (see?) love interest whose delivery of dialogue rivals Siri on Valium. 

Once Fairuza Two and the remaining students discover a book of spells in a hidden lair, the girls spend some montages preparing to summon Satan or gain knowledge or do something that involves naughtiness. The details are fuzzy, but you can count on a few naked teenagers, some deep demon voiceovers, and a not-that-epic-at-all showdown between the screechy Faith and funtime Jamie.

Directed by Jane Simpson, Little Witches is not a particularly good movie, but if IMDB's 2-week product claim is correct, then it certainly could have been worse. There’s plenty of muted sleaze to keep things somewhat interesting, plus bonus supporting turns by a few genre gems. It doesn’t have a toilet bowl full of snakes on the OTHER witchy thriller of 1996, but it’s nice to know there’s another one.

High Points

Rappaport really does do her damnest to keep her scenes alive. When she’s paired with capable costars (including an always welcome Clea DuVall), Little Witches can appear to be a decent movie. When she’s paired with, well, Mimi Rose, at least she keeps things interesting

Low Points

The presence of the late, great Zelda Rubinstein is always welcome. The waste of her time is not.

Lessons Learned

The trick to fishing is to say three Hail Marys before throwing the line in the water

The trick to not being killed by a demon is to enact stricter supervision over troubled teenagers

The trick to surviving a Good Friday black mass is to shove a Eucharist down the chanters’ throats with all the fervor of Kristy Swanson at the finale of Flowers In the Attic

Rent/Bury/Buy

Hey, for a 90 minute instant watch, Little Witches offers some goofy 90s charm. It doesn’t quite have the nerve to revel in its sleaziness, but there’s still enough to go around, especially if you put it next to the far less fun 5ive Girls. Those who enjoy this decade’s horror output will chuckle at some of the nostalgia, although looking at Little Witches now, it’s hard not to think of it as a pre-Asylum adaptation of the funner, more expensive The Craft. Then again, a cheap quickie version of The Craft costarring Clea DuVall and, in case I haven’t mentioned it, Jennifer Rubin as a nun with a fanny pack is kind of something special, wouldn’t you say?

Get Out of My Bad Dreams and Into My Cult

Perhaps it's my own age, but I always find something truly special about non-slasher horror films made in the 1980s. Once you hack your way through the cookie cutter patterned Friday the 13ths and their knockoffs, there is a seemingly endless supply of decent little thrillers rich in gore, compelling storylines, and character actors that instantly keep viewers young by challenging them to identify what other 1980s horror or 1990s sitcom they made brief appearances in.


For these reasons and more, I was excited to finally view 1988's Bad Dreams, a Nightmare on Elm Street-ish inspired flick that had the terrible luck of premiering around the same time as Freddy’s most beloved outing against the Patricia Arquette-led Dream Warriors. Well-cast and directed by a young (very young) Andrew Fleming (he who would go on to make a personal 8th grade favorite, The Craft), Bad Dreams is not what you would call a classic, but certainly worth its weight in dead mental patients and 80s era scoring.


Quick Plot: We open on an icily blond Richard Lynch leading his Waco-esque (pre-Waco times) cult into a fiery mass suicide. One young woman, Cynthia (Nightmare 3’s mohawk donning Jennifer Rubin), survives alone, falling into a 13 year coma which wakes her up conveniently enough in the 1980s, just in time to ride the nightmare horror craze and act beside a Summer School era Dean Cameron in a powerful supporting role. Since Cynthia has no memory of the fire and has even less resources in the outside world, she’s committed to a mental asylum headed by ReAnimator’s Bruce Abbott and Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s Henry Yulin*. Cynthia struggles to fit into the kooky borderline personality support group, quite a challenge when she’s continually haunted by the eerie image of a post-burning Lynch and the slightly uncomfortable fact that everyone she seems to talk commits suicide in an elaborate manner.

This is not your fluffy dumb and dead teenager movie, despite its reputation as Freddy's illegitimate child tucked away in a VHS love nest. While Bad Dreams was clearly influenced by the more famous films of its time, it holds its own and holds up well 20 years later. Sure, we've seen our share of pretty young women with ghostly visions and questionable sanity, but middle aged horndogs being splattered by violent air conditioning and salty mouthed Weekly World News reporters add new and welcomed touches to an age old sub-genre. The film is not without its faults--a clumsy climax and not quite fully realized villain revelation bog down its second half--but Bad Dreams ultimately succeeds on its own terms in creating a new story with memorable characters and a few moments of actual fear.


High Points
From Jennifer Rubin’s sympathetic amnesiac to the quirky but resonant mental patients and always enigmatic Richard Lynch, the entire cast turns in solid performances to make you genuinely care about each character




If you read my disappointed review of The Believers, you may know that I have a fascination of sorts with cults. While I still would have preferred a little more exploration into Unity Field, the presentation of this Jonestown-ish group is haunting and realistic


The gore is not nearly as explicit as in the Nightmare series, but Bad Dreams does boast a few memorably twisted and creative death scenes, plus a truly disturbing and impressively directed baptism by fire that may indeed induce your own bad dreams


Low Points
Somewhere along the line, the film switches viewpoints from Rubin’s patient to Abbott’s psychologist and while this does produce one of the film’s wackiest and most entertaining sequences, it also loses our character investment

This moment actually made me happy, but not in a good way: note the final expression and blase shrug of the police investigator at the film’s resolution. Should major characters really express such a blatant lack of interest after a dramatic and deadly showdown between the protagonists and villain?


Lessons Learned
If you want to be totally 80s, get two divorces and a yeast infection. If all you can handle is Cleveland, stick to the 70s.


Having secret sex in a turbine fan room carries risks far greater than herpes


The record for longest tenure in a coma is 37 years


Comas will do wonders for your hair and complexion

Rent/Bury/Buy
Fans of 80s studio horror should enjoy Bad Dreams as an interesting, if not amazing remnant of a time when horror had something of a heyday. While it doesn’t pack the lasting visual innovation of its ultimate rival, Dream Warriors, it is a well-acted and sometimes haunting film that refreshingly does not involve zombies, big men with machetes, or boobs (sorry boys; the ladies can enjoy the sexiness of Bruce Abbott’s Mr. Rogers’ sweater). The DVD includes a few older featurettes, along with a friendly commentary by writer-director Fleming. An alternate ending packs a creepy and appropriate punch before finishing with a dime store Halloween decoration image that belongs in no film made for more than thirty seven dollars and eighty two cents. Bad Dreams is definitely worth a viewing and could have enough rewatchability potential to merit a purchase.


*You might be wondering why I seem to have this need to credit each actor with another performance. Truly, it’s just too hard not to when nearly every cast member has some notable horror or cult film on his or her resume. Plus, I've been playing the movie-actor-movie connection game for nearly two days, so I'll personally take any chance to boost my personal database of useless film knowledge.