Little Witches

Little Witches is a 1996 Canadian-American horror film directed by Jane Simpson and written by Brian DiMuccio and Dino Vindeni. It has a similar plot to The Craft and released in the same year, though Little Witches had a much smaller budget.

This article is about the 1996 film. For the 2011 film also known under this title, see Sexual Witchcraft.
Little Witches
Theatrical release poster
Directed byJane Simpson (filmmaker)
Produced byDonald P. Borchers
Written byBrian DiMuccio
Dino Vindeni
StarringMimi Rose
Sheeri Rappaport
Music byNicolás Rivera
CinematographyRon Turowski
Edited byKristina Trirogoff
Release date
  • December 23, 1996 (1996-12-23)
Running time
90 minutes
CountryUnited States
Canada
LanguageEnglish

Plot

Faith Ferguson (Mimi Rose) is a relatively shy but intelligent teenager who is heartbroken when her mother informs her that she must spend Easter break at her Catholic girls' school as opposed to coming home. She's roomed with the rebellious Jamie (Sheeri Rappaport), who initially scandalizes Faith with her wild antics. Despite her initial misgivings, Faith finds herself bonding slightly with Jamie and the four other teen misfits that had to remain behind - Erica, Gina, Nicole, and Kelsey. The group is soon intrigued when construction work on the school's church uncovers a Satanic temple containing the mummified remains of several schoolgirls believed to have gone missing almost a hundred years ago.

The girls venture into the temple one night while everyone is asleep and they discover an ancient book written in Latin. Faith is fluent in Latin and translates the book, which outlines a spell that will summon a demon from the pits of hell. Jamie and some of the other girls are eager to practice the spell, but Faith is reticent due to the spell requiring a virgin sacrifice - especially after learning that the schoolgirls were murdered by a guardian devoted to keeping the spell from being cast. This reluctance, along with her interactions with a handsome construction worker named Daniel (Tommy Stork), helps alienate her from Jamie, who was somewhat attracted to him. Things grow more tense when the teens return to the hidden room and discover that there is still a guardian around, as the room was covered in graffiti that warned them that summoning the demon would lead to their deaths. Because Faith has refused to help translate the rest of the book, Jamie decides to play a cruel trick on her by inviting Daniel to their room and making it appear as if he was trying to rape her.

The girls' young schoolteacher, Sister Sherilyn (Jennifer Rubin), provides Faith with some guidance and has her bring meals to Mother Clodah (Zelda Rubinstein), a strange nun bearing a distinctive birthmark on her face. This ends up being to Faith's benefit, as she manages to avoid falling under one of Jamie's spells by praying with Mother Clodah. Unfortunately the encounter also ends with Mother Clodah's death due to Jamie poisoning her meal, believing Mother Clodah to be the guardian. Jamie, who has taught herself to read Latin due to Faith's refusal to translate, proceeds with the spell as planned. The movie implies that the teens will use Faith as a sacrifice due to her virginal nature, but Jamie ends up using Daniel instead after she learns that he is also a virgin. Horrified that they are moving forward with the spell, Faith receives help from Sister Sherilyn, who reveals that she is the guardian. They manage to stop the ceremony in time to save Daniel, but at the cost of the lives of Jamie and all of the other girls involved with the spell.

Cast

Reception

Reception for Little Witches was largely negative,[1][2] with a Rovi reviewer panning the film.[3] The Chicago Sun-Times commented that the film was full of cliches, while The Kansas City Star named it one of the "worst videos of 1996".[4][5] JoBlo praised the acting for Rappaport while panning the film overall.[6]

gollark: At least it has generics.
gollark: Oh, and it's not a special case as much as just annoying, but it's a compile error to not use a variable or import. Which I would find reasonable as a linter rule, but it makes quickly editing and testing bits of code more annoying.
gollark: As well as having special casing for stuff, it often is just pointlessly hostile to abstracting anything:- lol no generics- you literally cannot define a well-typed `min`/`max` function (like Lua has). Unless you do something weird like... implement an interface for that on all the builtin number types, and I don't know if it would let you do that.- no map/filter/reduce stuff- `if err != nil { return err }`- the recommended way to map over an array in parallel, if I remember right, is to run a goroutine for every element which does whatever task you want then adds the result to a shared "output" array, and use a WaitGroup thingy to wait for all the goroutines. This is a lot of boilerplate.
gollark: It also does have the whole "anything which implements the right functions implements an interface" thing, which seems very horrible to me as a random change somewhere could cause compile errors with no good explanation.
gollark: - `make`/`new` are basically magic- `range` is magic too - what it does depends on the number of return values you use, or something. Also, IIRC user-defined types can't implement it- Generics are available for all of, what, three builtin types? Maps, slices and channels, if I remember right.- `select` also only works with the built-in channels- Constants: they can only be something like four types, and what even is `iota` doing- The multiple return values can't be used as tuples or anything. You can, as far as I'm aware, only return two (or, well, more than one) things at once, or bind two returns to two variables, nothing else.- no operator overloading- it *kind of* has exceptions (panic/recover), presumably because they realized not having any would be very annoying, but they're not very usable- whether reading from a channel is blocking also depends how many return values you use because of course

References
  1. "Mini Reviews (October 2001)". ReelFilm. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  2. "Review: Little Witches". EFilmCritic. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  3. "Review: Little Witches". New York Times. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  4. "Cliches cast a spell for `Little Witches'". Chicago Sun-Times. February 8, 1999. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  5. "Here they are: The 10 best and worst videos of 1996". Kansas City Star. 1997-01-10. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
  6. "Review: Little Witches (1996)". JoBlo. Retrieved 27 October 2012.
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