Cailee Spaeny | ASSHOLES WATCHING MOVIES

If you were a teenager in the 1990s, you probably remember The Craft. It’s a pretty good 90s time capsule, particularly its alt-rock soundtrack that Columbia House was eager to send to you for free*, and also Skeet Ulrich. The Craft did not go out of its way to set up a sequel, which in hindsight is also a characteristic of a bygone era.

These days, everything is open for a sequel, or better yet, a franchise. And Hollywood is retroactively franchising lots of films that seemed like one-offs. Now it’s The Craft’s turn to get sequelized, and possibly franchised(-ized?). That’s a very 2020 approach, especially since due to COVID-19 The Craft: Legacy has gone straight to VOD as a premium rental.

Lourdes (Zoey Luna), Frankie (Gideon Adlon) and Tabby (Lovie Simone) are teen girls who want to be witches. But their attempts are not going well, because as the original film established you always need four witches before things get crazy. Enter Lily (Cailee Spaeny), the new girl in town, who has a really awful first day of school but as a result catches the eye of the witch trio, and once they get together the magic starts to happen.

Speaking of 90s relics, David Duchovny is in this movie as Lily’s mom’s fiance, which is why Lily and her mom (Michelle Monaghan) have moved to this little west coast town, and which I have the feeling is the same town as in the first film. Do those little details matter? They might, in the next instalment!

I expected this movie to be really, really awful, and it’s actually quite fun. A big reason why it’s fun is the way the witches use their powers. They didn’t use their powers to ruin people’s lives or to seek revenge. That bad girl trope is consistent with the longstanding narrative that powerful women are to be feared, but it’s beyond time we got rid of it and let women be superheroes, and that’s exactly what The Craft: Legacy does. After all, there was no doubt that when Peter Parker got magical powers, he was going to use them for good, and this film lets its heroes do the same. The fact that outcome seems unusual or worth mentioning shows the inequality at play, and in that respect as much as anything, The Craft: Legacy shows both how far we have come since the 1996 original, and how far we have to go.

It also happens to be an entertaining film where girls get cool powers and fight bad guys, so it’s win-win.

The title promises “bad times” and that’s exactly what this film delivers. In saying that I am not criticizing Bad Times at the El Royale. It’s a well-made variation on the multiple perspective crime genre (think Pulp Fiction) and it will keep you guessing until the end as each character is introduced and additional information is gained from each new perspective. But while Quentin Tarantino mixed a fair bit of humour into Pulp Ficton’s dark brew, writer-director Drew Goddard’s El Royale is a long row of tequila shots without a chaser. It starts slowly but even then, right from the start, the tense atmosphere tells you that a lot of bad shit is coming.

__5b18c1af51a71 The main events in Bad Times at the El Royale unfold over the course of one rainy night on the Nevada-California border. The El Royale is literally split in half by the state line, so the first challenge for each guest is to decide in which state they’d like to stay. Unfortunately, things have gone downhill at the El Royale ever since it lost its Nevada gaming licence, so the hotel is essentially deserted. Ringing the bell doesn’t summon the desk clerk; it takes several seconds of beating on the “staff only” door to wake him. Once he’s up, the guests are able to check in – there are four at first, and two more will show up before the night is done. Hardly any of the guests are what they seem, and only a couple of them will live long enough to check out in the morning.

While the movie doesn’t quite reach “classic” status, the solid premise and excellent cast still make this film worth watching. It’s absolutely packed with talent, as demonstrated by the always-excellent Nick Offerman being relegated to a blink-and-you’ll-miss it role (though he does get to do some woodworking, of sorts, so that was probably reason enough for him to sign on). Bad Times at the El Royale gave me a tense, suspenseful night chock full of hardboiled twists and turns, and that’s all I could have asked for before the sunrise.