Jeunes sorcières

Having just re-watched "Little Witches", I was disappointed. It's nowhere near as good as I remembered.

Of course, I mostly remembered the nudity, which the movie well-advisedly does not skimp on. But it's not a softcore flick, so there is an attempt at plot... an attempt which absolutely fails.

Other than the basic set-up which can probably be gleaned from looking at the DVD box - that is, a group of Catholic schoolgirls get involved in "witchcraft" - I don't know what the movie was about. There is something about hunky construction workers on the school grounds who dig up a corpse or a relic or something and the girls use the dig site in their rites. Also, predictably, the sexpot schoolgirl goes evil and the goody-two-shoes girl goes heroic in the end.

The acting in the movie is better than it really deserves. In particular, Mimi Rose, who plays the good girl, makes her into a character you can believe in, and there seems to be more going on behind the bad girl's performance than just going through the motions. The movie also has legendary character actors Jack Nance and Zelda Rubinstein but doesn't benefit that much from their appearance other than a couple of good scenes. Rubinstein only does one scene. She was an actress with a unique and powerful presence who added an pearl of strangeness to every movie she appeared in. If they had made her, say, the principal of the school and had her appear in multiple scenes in the movie, that could have established an atmosphere that would have suited the movie's try-hard spooky hijinks. It may even have elevated them to something the audience might have cared about.

The music, also, is terrible b-movie synth slop, overbearing from beginning to end, and headache inducing.

I'm not sure why I liked this one so much the first time around. I'm watching the final scene right now and I don't even know what's happening. I didn't care enough to try to follow the plot.

Cheesy SFX. Nun poisoning. Catholic school girls performing black rituals in the nude. ...What's not to like?

Check out Clea DuVall, from the highly cool and woefully underrated THE FACULTY.

"Little Witches" follows a group of girls at a Catholic boarding school in Southern California who are holed up together over the Easter vacation. Some rowdy, some bored, and some sexually repressed, they group together and begin dabbling with the occult, and unleash evil beyond their imagination.

Often footnoted as the cut-out bin-equivalent to "The Craft," "Little Witches" is drawing on a lengthy tradition of Catholic schoolgirl occult exploitation that has been a trend dating back to the television films of the seventies—"Satan's School for Girls" and "The Possessed" come to mind. In fact, "Little Witches" is really not all that different from those films, aside from the fact that its straight-to-video release allowed for gratuitous nudity and other material that would've never made it on television. In spite of this, the film very much feels like a made-for-TV movie, with indolent cinematography, a distracting musical score, and anemic performances from just about all involved.

In short, yes, this is a terrible film, one whose main attraction for many is the abundance of female flesh and sacrilegious antics. The flip side? There is definitely an audience for it, and though I can't necessarily count myself as one of them, I can understand where people find the charm in it. The film is peppered with fun scenes, and the over-the-top ending is reminiscent of the hokiest of the "Children of the Corn" sequels. Jennifer Rubin plays the authoritative nun/mother figure of the film, while a young Clea DuVall has a small part as one of the sorores Satanae; Sheeri Rappaport plays the ringleader of the girls, while Mimi Rose plays (unconvincingly) the film's moral center. Zelda Rubinstein also makes a rather amusing token appearance.

Overall, "Little Witches" is a generally weak film that is also a vainglorious B-movie triumph in some sense. It's technically quite abysmal on most accounts, but it also oddly seems to be aware of this. There is fun to be had for the right frame of mind (or right viewer), but at the end of the day, it's still a cheap and easy Satanic sisterhood flick that, while more gratuitous than its peers, does not rise above them. 4/10.

Workmen uncover a mummified body under an all-girls Catholic boarding school. Some girls sneak into the underground cavern to drink communion wine and they find a mysterious book after a nude dance. They start exploring the world of witchcraft with it.

This is basically The Craft except worst and with nudity. Sheeri Rappaport is a compelling performer. Most the actors are fine. It's the weak writing and the weak directing that is the most problematic. The monster makeup and special effects are bad. It's a B-movie, a drive-in double-bill but not much more than that.

Despite most assessments, this isn't a rip-off of "The Craft" because this one actually has a plot which isn't based on a "Nightmare on Elm Street" flick.

And because the women take their clothes off, which is what most male "Craft"~watchers were hoping for.

Guess what? The women here are better looking.

I won't call it a great film, but it's ok ~ and far better than the tedious "The Craft."

2 NiroStars