★★★
“The Craft meets Heathers.”
The town of Calvert has had a long association with the dark arts, going back to the founding families in the early 19th century, many of whom were involved in a coven. Now, four of their descendants, led by Ronnie (Cipolla), are seeking to unleash the power of the “goddess witch” Ashura, which has been bound for centuries. They need a fifth to complete the necessary rituals, and their first potential recruit doesn’t quite work out, shall we say, after things get a bit… stabby. However, a quick seeking spell points them in the direction of history student Sophie (Gordon, who also wrote the script).
She has been working with local bookstore owner Emily (Skya, whom you may recognize as the heroine of Assassin’s Run), with the aim of achieving contact with her late mother, and the power Ashura will grant her devotees is a tempting lure. Of course, it’s not as simple as that. Indeed, it’s so obvious that it doesn’t even count as a real spoiler for me to tell you that Ronnie has no intention of sharing the power with anyone else, and the other four girls are just a means to that end. Emily needs to find the means to put the goddess witch-shaped genie back into the bottle, before she becomes just another piece of occult roadkill on the highway to hell.
I have to say, for a film both written and directed by women, it doesn’t paint a very positive picture of female relationships. Ronnie is an uber-bitch, perpetually demeaning and tearing down everyone else, and that seems to rub off on most of her coven-mates. The costumes also seem to have been chosen to pander to the male gaze. Which is a polite way of saying, most of them seem to come from the sluttier aisles of Hot Topic. Special credit to Jessica Louise Lamb for her contributions in this area, even if the nudity she provides seems, again, at odds with the usual teen-girl audience for this sort of thing. Though as the possessor of the aforementioned gaze, I’m never going to complain about eye-candy.
There are almost no surprises to be found here, with the story-line proceeding in the expected way to the flood of digital effects that is the finale, e.g. the history professor (played by someone who looks like a low-rent version of Chrissy Teigen) who just happens to have a copy of a founding witch’s diary, key to proceedings. This is also a premise which is hardly novel. However, I low-key enjoyed these bitchy witches being bitchy, and it was all rather less po-faced than I expected. In some ways, it feels like a significantly higher-rent entry in the Witchcraft series. While that is certainly not necessarily a good thing, the franchise had its moments, at least as far as entertainment was concerned. This is much the same: if its quality is arguable, for me, it has enough moments to keep me entertained.
Dir: Margaret Malandruccolo
Star: Lizze Gordon, Jenny Cipolla, Margot Major, Sofya Skya