You know, I love the movies Ideal Home and Bad Dreams. I’d never guess that they were both written and directed by the same person, Andrew Fleming. You may not know the man, but chances are you know his 1996 film, The Craft.

Producer Douglas Wick (he produced Stuart Little and also co-wrote the sequels) wanted to create a movie that mixed the high school experience with witchcraft, which he worked on with screenwriter Peter Filardi (Flatliners). Well, he sure did it. This is a movie that was a quiet hit but has never gone away. Take it from someone who has dated plenty of goth girls.

Sarah Bailey (Robin Tunney, wearing a wig as she had shaved her head for Empire Records) is the new girl in town, having moved from Los Angeles to San Francisco with her father (Cliff DeYoung, Shock Treatment) and stepmother. She soon becomes friends with a group of outcasts who are rumored to be witches: the scarred Bonnie (Neve Campbell), trailer trash and totally awesome Nancy (the legit Wiccan Fairuza Balk, who was also in Return to Oz) and Rochelle (Rachel True, CB4), whose black skin in a nearly all white school makes her a target of ridicule. The witch rumor? Yeah, it’s true. They all worship an entity they refer to as Manon.

Sarah becomes attracted to the popular Chris Hooker (Skeet Ulrich, who was very much a thing in 1996), but he claims that they slept together and ruins her reputation before it gets started. That leads to the girls finally completing a big spell that gives them everything they want: Chris falls in love so hard that he can’t live without Sarah, racist bully Laura Lizzie (Christine Taylor) loses her hair and popularity, Bonnie becomes gorgeous and Nancy’s abusive stepfather dies and she gets rich.

However, it’s not enough. After a rite called the “Invocation of the Spirit,” Nancy gains even more power because, you know, she got hit by lightning (actual Wiccan Pat Devin was the on-set advisor, so maybe this really does occur). Now she can’t be stopped and all of the girls other than Sarah have gone wrong. The coven turns on her, but Sarah ends up stronger than all of them.

Of course, Blumhouse is remaking this, with Zoe Lister-Jones directing. There was talk of another remake and a direct to video sequel which never happened. I had hoped that that luck would have stopped this new version, but it’s already finished production.

I learned a really important lesson from The Craft. The girl I was dating at the time asked me which member of the coven I found most attractive. I said none of them. She kept pressing and begging for my answer. Of course Fairuza Balk is the right answer, but I kept quiet until finally, after an entire meal of her asking, I told her. She instantly grew angry and said, “The right answer is none of them!” Somewhere inside this story is a lesson.

I love the scene where all the fish wash up and the coven realizes how much power they have. You don’t know how many times the women in my life have made me watch this movie. I have grown smarter and not said a single thing about Nancy.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

Originally titled Recycler, after the Los Angeles magazine of the same name, this has a keyboard player named Chance (Rory Cochrane) getting to tour with dub-pop band Future Pigeon and their lead singer Rocket (Beth Orton), as long as he finds his signature sound. It exists in a Molotron keyboard which gets stolen the night before the tour, which leads Chance and Ross Angeles (Ross Harris) through Los Angeles in a search to get it back.

With appearances by Beck, Hank 3, Jennifer Herrema from Royal Trux, Gregg Henry from Body Double, skateboard legend Mark Gonzales, Laura Prepon in her first role, former pro wrestler Joshua Ben-Gurion, that dog drummer Tony Maxwell, Elliot Smith and even Robosaurus, this was directed by Steve Hanft, who wrote it with Rossie Harris and Bob Stephenson. He directed Beck’s video for “Loser,” as well as Kill the Moonlight, another film about someone named Chance with a dream.

If you like ramshackle journeys through dark nights of the soul, well, good news. This is a good one to watch, if only to see Elliot Smith drive a bus.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of watched films.

“In this sequel to the award-winning found-footage film NOCLIP, the two explorers return from the void in search of even more liminal spaces. They find new backrooms which lead to multiple surreal locations, plus some familiar ones.”

Directed, written by and starring Gavin Charles and Alex Conn, this Kansas City-filmed microbudget film takes viewers into Lunchland, a place of PTSD from grade school and more liminal spaces, or as Bloody Disgusting described these places that are neiether here, there or anywhere, they are rich with “the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in.”

Is it the spaces or the drugs that get you to this never place? Do they exist? Where am I, anyways? Why is the liminal space always at the mall? How late does it get before it becomes early?

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of films I’ve watched.

“Amid a mysterious deadly outbreak called the ITCH. A widower and his estranged young daughter take sanctuary in a department store, only to realize the real terror is inside with them.”

Directed, written by and starring Bari Kang, this has a disease call the Itch, which makes you scratch yourself, mutilating your body until there’s not much left. Jay and his daughter Olivia don’t just need to survivor those who have this infection; the normal humans are just as deadly, as Jay’s convenience store is invaded by Henry (Douglas Stirling) , a customer, and Miguel (Patrick Michael Valley) and Gabriella (Ximena Uribe), two burglars who end up trapped inside as the world comes to an end just past the metal barricade that has been pulled down.

Kang said, “ITCH! is inspired by a true event I witnessed at my family’s discount store,which also serves as the main setting for the movie. Without revealing too much, I saw abizarre scene involving a wild customer which left a lasting impression on me. This experience compelled me to create a film around it. I grew up watching movies from the70s, 80s, and 90s. As an immigrant, I often felt like an outsider, and film became my refuge, and my work drew inspiration from that era of filmmaking. My previous films were influenced by my long-time idols, Scorsese, Tarantino and Melville. With ITCH!, I aimed to pay homage to classic horror films like Dawn of the Dead, The Mist and 28 Days Later.”

An interesting, single location take on the zombie movie, ITCH! also has plenty of commentary on the nature of grief and what it’s like to be an immigrant in today’s America.

You can watch this and many other films at CFF by buying a pass on their website. Over the next few days, I’ll be posting reviews and articles, as well as updating my Letterboxd list of films I’ve watched.