Little Witches

The film Little Witches had many good qualities, but none so great as when the fat girl was filmed naked.

In the grand tradition of B horror movies, this one does have nudity (not to disappoint the male viewers) and stereotypes its characters like crazy, but it was good and actually scary. These were mostly unheard-of actors but they all did a good job. Clea DuVall has gone on since to do other movies: The Faculty and She's All That to name a few. Sheeri Rappaport, Mimi Reichmeister and Jennifer Rubin all were excellent. This movie was a very very effective contribution to the horror genre.

Workmen uncover a mummified body under an all-girls Catholic boarding school. Some girls sneak into the underground cavern to drink communion wine and they find a mysterious book after a nude dance. They start exploring the world of witchcraft with it.

This is basically The Craft except worst and with nudity. Sheeri Rappaport is a compelling performer. Most the actors are fine. It's the weak writing and the weak directing that is the most problematic. The monster makeup and special effects are bad. It's a B-movie, a drive-in double-bill but not much more than that.

In today's world of high-profile Hollywood special effects flicks, B-movies are very underrated and under-appreciated. Oscar material they are not, but they don't try to be. I, personally, have a love for B-cinema, whether it's B-horror, B-action, or B-science fiction. They're movies without big budgets, without big stars, and have poor scripts and poor acting, yet can be just as much fun as big Hollywood movies. A well-made B-movie is humorous, schlocky, tittilating, and most of all entertaining.

Jane Simpson's Little Witches is all of these. It contains everything that makes B-movies so much fun: Creepy horror, blood and gore, a low budget, hot catholic school girl babes, and loads of bare flesh. A truly entertaining and well-made B-movie. The term 'good bad movie' certainly applies to Little Witches. I'll be looking for Sheeri Rappaport in more films after this one.

"Little Witches" follows a group of girls at a Catholic boarding school in Southern California who are holed up together over the Easter vacation. Some rowdy, some bored, and some sexually repressed, they group together and begin dabbling with the occult, and unleash evil beyond their imagination.

Often footnoted as the cut-out bin-equivalent to "The Craft," "Little Witches" is drawing on a lengthy tradition of Catholic schoolgirl occult exploitation that has been a trend dating back to the television films of the seventies—"Satan's School for Girls" and "The Possessed" come to mind. In fact, "Little Witches" is really not all that different from those films, aside from the fact that its straight-to-video release allowed for gratuitous nudity and other material that would've never made it on television. In spite of this, the film very much feels like a made-for-TV movie, with indolent cinematography, a distracting musical score, and anemic performances from just about all involved.

In short, yes, this is a terrible film, one whose main attraction for many is the abundance of female flesh and sacrilegious antics. The flip side? There is definitely an audience for it, and though I can't necessarily count myself as one of them, I can understand where people find the charm in it. The film is peppered with fun scenes, and the over-the-top ending is reminiscent of the hokiest of the "Children of the Corn" sequels. Jennifer Rubin plays the authoritative nun/mother figure of the film, while a young Clea DuVall has a small part as one of the sorores Satanae; Sheeri Rappaport plays the ringleader of the girls, while Mimi Rose plays (unconvincingly) the film's moral center. Zelda Rubinstein also makes a rather amusing token appearance.

Overall, "Little Witches" is a generally weak film that is also a vainglorious B-movie triumph in some sense. It's technically quite abysmal on most accounts, but it also oddly seems to be aware of this. There is fun to be had for the right frame of mind (or right viewer), but at the end of the day, it's still a cheap and easy Satanic sisterhood flick that, while more gratuitous than its peers, does not rise above them. 4/10.