Netflix of the Witch: ALL CHEERLEADERS DIE, THE CRAFT, THE PUNK SINGER

Conjuring-from top: Fairuza (The Craft); Kathleen Hannah (Punk Singer); Sianoa Smit-McPhee (Cheerleaders)

Andrew Fleming hasn't made many films but he has a rare gift of getting the ambiguity of hallucinations exactly right: the way snakes seem to be writhing in every shadow as the underlying reptilian cortices of the DNA serpent-tongue universe entwine and unwind within your fever or alcohol-or-opiate withdrawal or mushroom-overdose or lack of sleep-wracked brain melts its tubes. Little turkeys with straw hats dancing in the shattered scream-filled shadows of Bellevue's alcoholic ward, the rats and the bats in the walls, oh my yes! Terrifying but soothing compared to the convulsions... lost my train of thought, but Fleming never does!


The Craft's photography is a little flat, as was the style for teen films of the era, and still is, alas, with the L.A.locations (lots of homeless) casting dour focus on the girls and the rather straight-lined moral justice. The swim team black girl (Rachel True) wishes the blonde racist taunter Christine Taylor's hair off, but Taylor's ensuing anguish makes her more sensitive to her past taunts and she apologizes, so True feels bad; Neve Campbell's horrible back scars magically disappear so now she's smokin' hot but turns vain and obnoxious; poor white trash punk Fairuza Balk gets rich but her mom wastes the money on a jukebox, etc. Before new girl Robin Tunney showed up , though, they were just goofing around with spell books and stolen candles and getting nowhere, since she's a real witch, descended from her witch mom who died in childbirth, she gives them a magick power boost which they're too immature to handle.


For her wish, poor Robin Tunney doesn't think to wish for deliverance from her crippling phobias and deliverance and instead indulges her masochistic attraction to one of those backwards baseball cap wearing tools (Skeet Ulrich). Later she lets Balk walk all over her with snake 'glimmers' and some Voodoo god of everything named Manon. Apparently the witchery consultant didn't want them to invoke a real spirit, lest they offend a Wiccan or two, or encourage young girls to summon things they wouldn't be able to control, the way the proliferation of Ouija boards in the seventies led to a glut of summoned demons we're still suffering from today.


With a tight script that never wastes a word on pointless chit-chat, and a stable cast rounded out by Pedro Almodovar regular Assumpta Serna as the white witch new age bookstore owner, there's some troublesome stretches of Tunney running around her house whining and puling, and believing in the snake and bug hallucinations, wherein we root for Balk's then-deranged stalker; and the almost DC comics-level morality hanging under all the karma has a troublesome subtextual implication that teenage girls can't be trusted with that level of unholy power, presuming they'll throw it away on petty revenge, vanity, financial gains and douchebag boys with their  snickering at everything and their prepubescent attempts at mustaches. Maybe that's true, but it's not why we're here. We want to see the douchebag boys get thrown out of a second story window, and to see Fairuza tear it up (and she does, she's a real witch in real life and her summoning scenes have a solid orgasmic power), we don't want to see Tunney trailing after the mayhem in horror, so girls watching will know that taking revenge against snickering date rapists is wrong, since you might hurt them. Fuck that. I'll see it again in a few years though, since it's short, fast, and cool overall. It's not quite as grrl-empowering as Night of the Comet, but then again what is?

That alt-emo quasi-feminist horror maven Lucky McKee (May, The Woods) and less successful writer director Chris Silverton (I Know Who Killed Me) be at it again in this bigger budgeted updated remake of their 2001 shot-on-video collaborative debut, a kind of Pretty Little Liars for the the Deathdream set. A year after the accidental death of the cheerleader squad captain, the hierarchy of a local high school goes into disarray: the late girl's beau, the narcissistic football captain, aptly named Terry Stankus (Tom Williamson), goes up against scheming lesbian hottie Maddy (Caitlin Stasey) for the affection of a pretty blonde (Brooke Butler). Maddy's own ex-girlfriend Leena (Sianoa Smit-McPhee) is a witch who follows her around and keeps the rune stones in play. Smash car and a few cuts later and Leena's fishing the cheerleaders out of the lake and bringing them back to life. Now they're cold zombies with different colored gems in their bodies who feel each other's orgasms and blood lusts. Parts are more successful than the whole: the blood is tacky cartoon CGI and the glowing colored rocks are corny and there's an excess of all the wrong people getting hurt (Stankus does a lot of really abhorrent stuff but dies only once) but the whole thing has a nearly Russ Meyer-level of gonzo recklessness--we never know quite what's going to happen next--and allowing Maddy lots of vicious insult hurling at Stankus, Leena a lot of twisted witchy faces which--with her pale skin, black hair, and inch thick black eyeliner--make her quite the future camp horror icon-in-pupae form.


There's wry sense of subtle romantic humor, such as when Leena opens up her vein to feed her beloved undead Maddy and romantic music swells and wind blows through her hair in slow-mo real Harlequin paperback style; the little sister seduces the doofus virgin football guy in her older sister's body, so he believes all vaginas are cold as marble, etc.  But there's stupid shit too, like Leena leaving her rune stones in her locker, sans lock, for anyone to steal. Still, despite the vaguely skeevy aspects of hot girl-on-girl action as a turn-on for guys rather than a genuine lesbian love story (unsurprising considering it was written by two dudes), there's some sharp insight to lesbian trials and tribulations, such as how if you're a lesbian you can swoon for a hot chick you see walking by at the gym before you realize it's just you in the full wall mirror (which happened to a lesbian pal-o-mine), and just as you cannot escape your reflection you can never escape your ex, or her ex, and so on into a long daisy chain of former-lovers peering sullenly over each others' shoulders, or hooking up with each other to get back at you or your current girlfriend, all at your own dinner party. In other words, same gender equals double the problems and also more opportunities than in conventional boring ass straight relationships. I'm happy to say straight ass relationships get a bad showing in All Cheerleaders Die, much more than in the more conventional Craft. Though the boys are all just as skeev though not all are as date-rapey as Stankus. The scene where Maddy tears into him with a hurl of insults recalls similar scenes in Russ Meyer films, like Supervixens, and are a gas but he wreaks six pounds of misogyny to every wreaked vengeance ounce, and even the murders are undercut in intensity due to the blood's Tex Avery elasticity.

I like a lot of stuff about this energetic film--such as great roving camera that is seldom in the right place at the right time--and look forward to 'part two.' But in the anticlimactic retribution relative to the rampant misogynistic violence makes this a bit like disproportionate payback to the abuse in Jack Hill's Foxy Brown as opposed to Jack Hill's awesome Coffy; another drawback is the ridiculous slow-mo CGI blood, making it seem like this movie at one point wanted to court a teen market rather than the Alamo Drafthouse crowd. Still, Smit-McPhee has Fairuza Balk-and/or-Multiple Maniacs-era Divine cachet, despite her 'killing people on school grounds is wrong' ethos and the film is way better than the average found-Netflix dreck, albeit in the end, dreck it is, unsteady on its feet as it tries to serve too many demographics at once. Lucky, don't be afraid to get a woman co-writer, the way Deborah Hill did for Halloween or Gale Ann Hurd for The Terminator, or Karen Walton for Ginger Snaps. That way we won't have to pretend to be appalled by your male gaze eye candy, in case Kathleen Hanna is watching our every lustful eye movements from her crystal oculus. That little hottie really has our number, but McKee, you're a very sick girl.