The original version of The Craft is a movie that has never gone away. Written and directed by Andrew Fleming, who also made one of my favorite (and most derivative) slashers, Bad Dreams, and screenwritten by Peter Filardi (Flatliners) with direction from producer Douglas Wick, who wanted to mix the high school experience with witchcraft, the stories that it tells have continued to engage audiences since it came out in 1996.

This Blumhouse reimagining/sequel had the opportunity to be interesting. Would it take a whole new pass at the story? Would it refer to anything from the past? Or would it be a muddled mess that tries to have a little of both?

This new version has the same problem with so many reimagining: instead of either giving you a new look at an old story or moving past the origin to tell the real story that people want to see (doing so here will necessitate a big spoiler, so I’ll explain more at the end of this after plenty of spoiler space), this just tells a new origin and sets up characters without creating a single memorable moment or character that you come back to and want to know more about.

The original four girls — Sarah, Bonnie, Nancy and Rochelle — each had their own reasons for turning to witchcraft. They all had their own issues, personalities and even styles. And almost 25 years later, I can still tell you about them and how their individual stories all come together.

I just watched this movie last night and I can not tell you a single identifiable thing about the three supporting characters that make up the witches other than two (Frankie and Lourdes) are interchangeable brunettes and Tabby is a black girl who jokes that she doesn’t like Beyonce. We learn nothing of their home lives, their challenges and who they want to be in this world, only that they feel ostracized and they feel the need to turn to the left hand path.

Lily Schechner is the girl who will be their fourth, completing their coven. She’s new in town, as her mom has moved to a new town to live with Adam Harrison (David Duchovny) and his three sons. Maybe I’ve grown too old, but every boy in this movie felt so interchangeable that I had difficulty figuring out which one was their friend Timmy and which were the three brothers.

In fact, why did there even have to be three brothers? None of them are truly essential to the story at all, with the oldest being a cipher at best and a living jump scare at worst. They are interchangeable stock characters that you could remove from this movie and still end up in the same place. Even the villain — spoiler, it’s Duchovny) never really seems to gain any steam or even appear to be much of a threat.

Zoe Lister-Jones, who wrote and directed this, never really sets up any tension. Again, I must refer to the first movie, where it seemed like without magic, the girls’ lives would be meaningless. Nancy, for example, has a life so depressing that you wonder why it took her so long to go completely off the deep end. Her reveal as a sociopath and the girls must working together to stop her tragic unraveling speaks volumes. The moment where the girls realize that getting everything they wanted still leaves them wanting more is as well. Not a single moment happens in this movie that comes within a newt’s eye of that.

That said, Lister-Jones based much of the film and its characters in her own adolescent experiences as a misgendered youth. She also moved with her mother into a home of all men, so she had to adapt. This is the only part of this film that seems true to me.

Now, after adequate spoiler space, I’ll tell you the problem.

Have you ever seen the Jem and the Holograms movie? It spent so much time telling you the origin story — which took 22 minutes in the original cartoon — that the moment you want to see, Pizzazz and the Misfits vs. Jem and the Holograms, is relegated to a post-credit scene of a perfectly cast Kesha threatening to ruin the happy ending.

Here, Lily learns with about ten minutes left in the film that she’s adopted. As we get to the end credits, we follow her to a hospital where she gets to meet her birth mother…Nancy Downs (Fairuza Balk). The story of what happened, why Nancy is still in an asylum and how she could have had a daughter, as well as what happens next, is way more interesting than what we just watched.

The frustrating thing of Blumhouse — the studio who made a Black Christmas that seemed more like The Skulls and a Halloween that spent inordinate time discussing sandwiches and peanut butter on private parts than having The Shape murder people — is that they will eventually remake every horror movie worth anything. Sure, we’ll always have what came before, but for some young folks, their first exposure to something great will be a watered-down modern reimagining that’s missing the word imagination.

Lester Bacon misses the old days of slaughtering food, when you got to do it with your hands. Now everything is automated and the local cops and government want to buy him out for $50,000. He’s pretty much forced to take the deal and has thirty days to get out.

But then again, there is his son Buddy, who is really, really good at slicing up anything in his way.

Of course, the slaughterhouse would be exactly where the sheriff’s daughter would go along with her friends to make a horror movie. Because that’s what teenagers did in 1987, go make shot on video films. They get scared off, but one of the boys bets them $20 — which seems like a small amount of money even 33 years ago — to survive a night back at the Bacon Slaughterhouse.

Whoops.

That said, this is a movie with a killer who grunts throughout the film* and an unexpected ending, so it has that going for it. It also has way more new wave on the soundtrack than you’d expect, seeing as how it has a very rural setting.

This being a late 1980’s rental slasher, you know there’s only one place to get it, right? Vinegar Syndrome. I should really just sign over part of my pay to them every year pre-tax, like I do for healthcare.

*Joe B. Barton, who played Buddy, did a radio tour where he stayed in character the whole time.

Dominick Brascia was Joey in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning, as well as writing and directing Evil Laugh and this film. He moved into radio and sadly died in 2018. But hey — he did three slashers, counting this one, so let’s take a look.

When John was a little kid, his grandfather would constantly tell him that he was a vampire, so he did what I would have as a child. He grabbed a stake and dropped that bloodsucker. Except, you know, his grandfather was just joking and as a result, John grew up in a mental hospital.

But hey, things worked out OK. Now he’s in a rock and roll band and once the cops tell him they’re too loud for the garage, he heads to the house his grandmother left him. That said, his bandmates are getting killed off one by one, possibly by a werewolf who was once his grandfather, so maybe things aren’t so great.

So I guess the Bad Boys are never going to make it, despite their willingness to sound more like Bryan Adams than you’d expect from a movie with hard rock in the title and wear women’s lingerie.

Actually, this movie is a lot like Rock ‘N’ Roll Nightmare, except you don’t get to see Thor fight a demon or drive around for 35 minutes. If I was making a scale of metal horror films, with Trick or Treat as the top of the scale, I’d probably use this as the bottom. It is also no Black Roses, Rocktober Blood or Blood Tracks, either.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Also known as Slasher In the House, this is one of the few Thanksgiving slashers that I can think of — that said, I can tell you others are Deadly Friend, Blood Freak, ThanksKilling, ThanksKilling 3, Blood Rage, the remake of The Boogeyman, Kristy and Intensity — and it’s also a section 3 video nasty, so it has that going for it.

It also stars Body By Jake star Jake Steinfeld, who legend says refuses to discuss that he was ever in this movie. Dude, if he had Cameo, I’d pay to ask about this movie every single day. He plays PCP addict Jay Jones, a guy who has already destroyed his parents.

Harold Bradley should have never made Thanksgiving dinner for the nine victims in this movie, including his heavy metal son “Mistake.” But here we are, with car trunks getting slammed onto heads, stabbing nice young ladies and the aforementioned KISS loving son getting electrocuted.

Director Nettie Peña was an editor and associate producer on Dracula Sucks, so there’s that.

This is also the first role for Vanessa Shaw, who was Allison in Hocus Pocus (and also appeared in Eyes Wide Shut, Ladybugs and the remake of The Hills Have Eyes).

Seriously, Mistake should have been the killer, or better yet, he could have just run away and survived, heading off to Wisconsin where he and Marvelous Mervo would start a band that would destroy minds and reap souls when they both weren’t playing practical jokes, peeping on women and crying about how tough life was for them.

Also: more movies should have killers that inject PCP directly into their tongue before grunting like maniacs and killing everyone around them. Remember when people did PCP and would go nuts and turn into criminal supermen? Whatever happened to it after the video game NARC?

You can watch this on YouTube.