Nancy: Fairuza Balk
Sarah: Robin Tunney
Bonnie: Neve Campbell
Rochelle: Rachel True
Chris: Skeet Ulrich
Laura Lizzie: Christine Taylor
Lirio: Assumpta Serna
Grace: Helen Shaver
Girls can be geeks too.
And in The Craft, three girls at St. Bernard's Academy,
Nancy (Fairuza Balk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle
(Rachel True), are the spell-casting nerds who are looking for a fourth
member to complete the "circle" linked with witchcraft and the occult.
Enter Sarah (End Of Days' Robin Tunney),
the new girl arriving to study in her final year. Being new, she's finding it
hard to fit in, which makes her perfect fodder to tag along with the aforementioned
other oddballs who nobody likes, but, as it happens, who wield more power than
you could possibly imagine. These days, it could almost be an episode of
Hollyoaks is Zara (what the hell are those teeth all about?) Turner
is involved.
Where the two differ, though, is that these girls have the power to indirectly
kill people, to give an extreme example, when it comes to those who are actually
try to cause harm to them, but if you take things a step too far then it tends
to come back on you in spades, so, to quote Jerry Springer, "Be good
to yourselves... and, each other."
The Craft is a totally inoffensive film and will easily pass the
90+ minutes with ease, but it's not a particularly exciting one and when the
closing credits appear you might wonder why you really bothered. It's also
one of the DVDs from Columbia, first brought out as one of the initial launch
in April 1998 with scant extras, now being reissued as a "Collector's Edition"
with a few more, but not a great deal more and it's hard to see why it
justifies the "CE" tag.
I have almost no complaints with the picture quality. It looks a little soft
at times, but on the whole it's free of artifacts and print defects.
The picture is in the original 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen ratio.
The average bitrate is 6.84Mb/s, often peaking above 8Mb/s.
Dolby Digital 5.1 comes in English, French and German flavours. When the witches
swoop on their broomsticks - almost - the melee of sound FX kicks in nicely, but
outside of that there's not a lot happening in the aural department.
As alighted to earlier, it's not particularly packed with extra features.
There's a 2-minute Trailer in 4:3 open-matte and Dolby Digital 5.1 sound,
a making of Featurette that runs for almost 25 minutes and features
cast and crew members talking the usual nonsense to camera. Three Deleted
Scenes are also included, each with a separate commentary track.
The disc includes a feature-length Director's Commentary, Filmographies
for the director and all four of its main stars and an Isolated Score
to show off Graeme Revell's work.
As this is a Columbia DVD we have the usual 28 chapters and subtitles in a massive
17 languages :
English, French, German, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Hindi, Turkish, Danish,
Arabic, Swedish, Finnish, Icelandic, Dutch, Norwegian, Greek and Hebrew.
The main menu has a short scored piece of looped animation showing the gruesome
foursome doing their bidding.
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
