THE CRAFT: LEGACY is, in my opinion, a remaquel. It technically takes place after the events of the 1996 film, with new characters, but the basic setup is intentionally a repeat, and the sequel part plays like it was meant to be a surprise at the very end. I believe that if they cut that scene and the subtitle then everyone would’ve accepted this as just a remake with some nice twists and changes in details.

Whatever you want to call it, it works best as a companion piece, a compare-and-contrast exercise, and there’s quite a bit that lines up. Once again we have a new girl moving to town with her single parent, she befriends the three outsider girls who are in need of a fourth person for their witch’s circle, they successfully cast some spells on their tormenters, including a mean jock boy who she causes to start following her around being nice to her. A small difference is that it’s not a Catholic school this time, so they get to be straight up goth without taking liberties with the school uniform. A bigger difference is that the newcomer’s family is central to the story.

Lily (Cailee Spaeny after BAD TIMES AT THE EL ROYALE but before PRISCILLA and ALIEN: ROMULUS) and her mom (Michelle Monaghan, MR. & MRS. SMITH) come to town to live with mom’s boyfriend Adam (David Duchovny, DON’T TELL MOM THE BABYSITTER’S DEAD, EVOLUTION), who has three not particularly welcoming sons, Jacob (Charles Vandervaart, Outlander), Isaiah (Donald MacLean Jr., Nurses), and Abe (Julian Grey, THE MATRIX RESURRECTIONS). The oldest two are popular kids at the high school she’s transferring to.

Our craftswomen are Frankie (Gideon Adlon before SICK), Tabby (Lovie Simone, SELAH AND THE SPADES) and Lourdes (Zoey Luna, DEAR EVAN HANSEN). They’re not really mapped onto the original THE CRAFT characters – Frankie is the funniest one, so she kind of dominates like Nancy, but she’s not necessarily the craziest. Rather than initially rejecting the new girl, they’re the good Samaritans who come to the restroom to check on her after a humiliating incident where jock asshole Timmy (Nicholas Galitzine, HIGH STRUNG) points out to the whole class that period blood has soaked through her jeans. Later when Timmy taunts her about it in the hall and puts his hands on her shoulders she has a creepy-Carrie type episode, basically a force push that bounces him off the lockers. I rewinded it and watched it again. Good moment.

The coven witnesses that so they decide to test her by telepathically contacting her while she’s in detention, telling her to ask for a bathroom pass. And it works. When they quiz her about her history with this stuff she doesn’t know what they’re talking about, but what the hell, joins their circle.

They do some magic shit and they cast a spell on Timmy to make him nice. They call him “Woke Timmy” after he earnestly complains that another student is being “super inappropriate” and “making so many people here uncomfortable” during sex ed and “it can trigger alot of shit for people, okay?” He’s friends with Lily’s sorta-stepbrother Jacob, but now when he comes over he just ends up hanging out with the girls, to whom he tearfully confesses that he’s a closeted bisexual and once had sex with the oldest stepbrother Isaiah, who now avoids him and acts weird around him.

This is where I think the movie really exceeded my expectations. The love spell on Skeet Ulrich was a highlight of the original film, but this takes it to another level. First it gets the laughs, and brings up the sort of interesting question of whether she can have a real friendship with someone she had to use magic to turn nice. But then we start to see that he’s not only more likable, but much happier when his toxic masculinity has been taken from him. It’s not so much mind control as freeing him to be his true self. His whole bully persona is a performance to hide his true self and fit in. It’s a glamour, if you will.

Galitzine looked really familiar to me so I pulled the movie up on IMDb while watching and holy shit, that’s motherfuckin He-Man! I wonder if he got that role by being in THE CRAFT: LEGACY. It is in fact a pretty complex role, and he does a good job. It makes sense to reward him with the power of Grayskull. (And actually He-Man puts on an act of being the doofus Prince Adam. It’s the same thing.)

There’s definitely a light, ‘90s style feminist aspect to THE CRAFT: women (initially) banding together, trying to warn each other about shitty men, getting back at one of them. It’s witchcraft so it emphasizes the feminine, and there’s probly some sapphic tension there. On the other hand Nancy speaks in very heterosexual terms, calling upon the male force Manon, getting off on his power “filling” her. LEGACY is updated not just in the addition of a bisexuality subplot, but in the explicit feminist solidarity between the friends, which also specifically includes trans women. (I honestly hadn’t noticed Lourdes was trans when this came up.)

Maybe the biggest change from the first film is that there actually is a villain outside of the coven, and fittingly this enemy identifies as an expert on masculinity. Adam is a famous author and motivational speaker for men, which Lily doesn’t seem concerned about at first because he portrays himself as a very sensitive guy trying to teach men how to be enlightened husbands and all that. He even wears what my wife and I call a “Tyler Hynes sweater,” as seen in the films of Hallmark. But when he lectures Lily about how “disappointed” he is in her resorting to violence (by accidentally shoving a large man bullying her) the shitty stepdad vibes are overwhelming. It reminded me of friends’ shitty stepdads growing up. What a dick.

And of course he turns out to be much worse than he’s letting on, both in his beliefs about gender roles and in (spoiler) being an evil warlock trying to steal his stepdaughter’s power. It’s fair to connect him to current “manosphere” dweebs since Jordan Peterson is part of that and he’s only 2 years younger than Duchovny, but I think of Adam as more like the men’s groups we heard about when I was growing up who would go out into the woods and have shirtless drum circles and chop wood or something. They’re getting in touch with the primitive such and such and it’s okay I guess until suddenly they say something about the role of the husband and wife that will make your skin crawl.

Anyway the twist of him having magic powers is silly but kind of needed. The right silly for our times. I like how this one reverses the original: instead of the lead distancing herself from the witches because they’re getting out of control, they distance themselves from her because they worry she’s gone too far (and really they’re being overly cautious). Then instead of being in opposition for the climax, they are reunited to fight off the new threat. Overall they’re more powerful, it’s a more absurd amount of magic (they freeze time in a light-hearted cafeteria montage) but I don’t think it gets too overblown.

At the very end there’s the sequel connection that’s kind of what everybody expected or suspected, and maybe it was exciting for those who went in not having heard it would happen, but for me it fell flat. (And SPOILER: Didn’t it seem in the one shot of her like she was supposed to be scary? I think they could’ve treated her with sympathy and it would’ve worked better. But I suppose they made this with another sequel in mind.)

This one’s written and directed by Zoe-Lister Jones, better known as an actor (“CIA Security Hub Tech,” SALT), but she wrote the movie LOLA VERSUS. I’ve heard of that. According to my calculations she was about 14 when THE CRAFT came out, so she’s honestly the perfect age to direct the sequel. I like how much she invests in the relationships, not just between the witches but also the way Lily tries to support her mother in her new relationship, Mom showing vulnerability, and also standing up for her daughter when Adam is mad, even before he’s completely out of line. By the way, this had a mother-daughter car singalong (to “Hand in My Pocket” by Alanis Morissette) before BARBIE.

I think I remember horror viewers saying THE CRAFT: LEGACY was bad when it came out, but in almost all respects it was better and more clever than I expected. I think it’s kinda good!