- Directed by Victoria Muspratt
- Written by Alon Kaplan
- Starring
- A.J. Cook
- Lexa Doig
- Aimee Castle
- Craig Olejnik
- Nadia Litz
- Produced by Marek Posival
- Executive produced by Vlad Paunescu, Donald Kushner, and Dana Scanlan (and Charles Band, uncredited)
Aren’t I just the cutest little naive thing? I keep approaching these Canadian-Romanian Pulsepounders! releases with an unwarranted, almost desperate hope that the adequate production resources available to those in charge of bringing this film to existence will be used to good effect, to tell an engaging and delightful story. Some have been better than others, but none of the sister productions to Teen Sorcery have ever come close to justifying their existence.
Almost, this time, we made it. But the first half of the movie makes promises that the second half has no intention of keeping.
All together now: Bi-YAAAATCH!!
As with so many filler movies for children and teens, this one begins with the transplantation of the outsider protagonist: Dawn (A.J. Cook, who’s gone on to TV’s Tru Calling and Criminal Minds) has just moved with her parents from California to Pilgrimstown, Massachusetts (aka the permanent suburban cul-de-sac set at Castel Film, which I’m coming to know almost as intimately as their Wild West main street). She’s less than thrilled with the relocation, and spends the day with her pro-grade camera, taking pictures at a nearby park — where it appears, a soccer match is proceeding with two teams and cheerleaders (!), but no spectators. Also, it isn’t really a soccer field. But I digress.
Her photography brings her to the attention of the head cheerleader, who makes no delay in “introducing” herself the next day. She’s Mercedes (Lexa Doig, better known from Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda), and she is without challenge the Queen Bee of the school — or Queen “B,” if you know what I mean. Later at lunch, Dawn apparently makes the “wrong” social choice by sitting (in the only available lunchroom seat) with three of the more introverted girls at school: Fran (Aimee Castle), Flo (Nadia Litz), and Mary (Ioana Cristescu). As these three are some of Mercedes’ default victims, Dawn cements herself as someone who needs to be put in her place.
Which Mercedes proceeds to do my mysterious means. Every time she looks pointedly at someone and clutches something around her neck under her blouse, something yucky happens: cockroaches explode out of Flo’s lunchbag, the clothes in Dawn’s gym locker shrink to toddler size1, and the boy in science class who expresses no interest in taking Mercedes to the school dance is confronted with a dissection frog with a glowing, beating heart. The boy in question is Michael (Craig Olejnik), a supposed nebbish who looks pretty mainstream to me. He met Dawn on her first day, which is why she volunteers to take the assignment of walking him home after he faints in science class. He doesn’t really enter much into the movie until later, but I figured I’d better not spring him on you when the time comes.
Sometimes these scripts actually do write themselves.
As usual in such movies, it takes the outsider to notice what the longtime residents never have, that Mercedes can so some very strange things. During a slumber party2, Dawn suggests to her girlfriends that they follow and observe Mercedes, and in the course of so doing they see strange things, like Mercedes’ pen doing her homework on its own while Mercedes does her nails. Eventually, Dawn follows Mercedes into the woods and sees her kneel in front of a certain tree, with her previously unseen amulet clutched in her hands. As the tree glows green and Mercedes chants some little rhyming spells, Dawn gets a couple of good shots before scampering off to avoid detection.
Well, hell; this is Massachusetts, right? So it’s all got to come down to witchcraft. The four girls explore the research materials at the local library for information on the amulet Dawn photographed and come up blank; then they ask he help of Mrs. Hatch (Anne Anglin), the wizened old librarian, and hit the jackpot. In the basement of the library, which doesn’t look like it’s been renovated since Cotton Mather was put to rest, Mrs. Hatch reads from an old tome about the Devilstone, once owned by a notorious witch in those parts, and split it two when the witch disappeared. Mercedes obviously has half of the Devilstone, from which she gets her sorcerous powers; but where is the other half?
Say what you will about the rest of the movie, but the town library’s kinda cool.
Why, right here! Mrs. Hatch is the last in a long line of half-Devilstone guardians, and having no one to pass it on to, she decides to give it to Dawn, who can use its powers to counteract Mercedes, once she and her friends have prayed at the tree. (No one ever explains why that tree has the shape of the Devilstone in its bark, or why it’s special. For that matter, no one asks how powers derived from something called the Devilstone can be turned to good.) And presto! Mercedes has some serious opposition!
Problem being, we’re maybe halfway into the movie. It’s way too early to get into the apocalyptic confrontation which should follow directly on the heels of the challenge to Mercedes’ authority. So we get a few scenes of Dawn counteracting and reversing Mercedes’ hexes. Not little things, either — Mercedes changes a classmate’s outfit into a clown suit, Dawn does the same to Mercedes and her cheerleader posse; Mercedes makes the lunches disappear off a cafeteria table, Dawn brings them back; Mercedes makes a freshman vanish, Dawn makes him reappear. For added filler, Dawn tries to make the principal’s speech at an assembly shorter, only to accidentally make him shorter. Then taller. Then shorter. Then normal, with funny hair. I mention this mostly because the principal is Constantin Barbalescu, my second-most favorite Romanian actor who invariably shows up in these movies; but also to point out that we’re now really lost any baseline of “normality” for high school. All of these sorcerous stunts, which would provoke general panic in the real world, is met with a, “Huh… so anyway…” attitude by the other students.
A promotional consideration was NOT paid by the Wham-O toy company…
But bigger story problems are on the horizon. Mercedes casts a spell on Dawn to put her into eternal sleep (which she does, for no particular reason except resonance with the classics, during a costume party for Dawn’s birthday). Which means that most of the rest of the movie is going to be Fran, Flo, and Mary, with Michael in tow, trying to bring her out of her spell before it becomes perfect. In case that wasn’t “Sleeping Beauty” enough for you, Michael’s last name is Charming.
In other words, our protagonist Dawn is now going to be almost utterly absent for the rest of the movie. And from here, things really fly off the rails; it’s almost as if screenwriter Aron Kaplan decided that, having committed the storytelling sin of removing the main character from her own story, it didn’t matter what he did. So we have Fran and the other girls taking possession of the Devilstone but never even trying to use it to reverse the spell (even though it’s demonstrated that any of the girls can use it). And Michael has a dream sequence of playing frisbee with Dawn in a medieval castle. And Mercedes sneaks in and abducts Dawn, then tauntingly tells Michael and the girls that Dawn is somewhere “much more rustic” than here. And Michael immediately, on the basis of that evidence alone, concludes that Dawn has been hidden in a parallel universe (!!), because, you know, there are certainly no places more rustic than the Castel Film suburban cul-de-sac in our dimension. So they leap through several parallel universe from a dimensional portal hidden in Mercedes’ locker, until they find a medieval one in which Dawn is hidden, because strengthening the “Sleeping Beauty” correspondences is more important than a coherent story.
…nor was a promotional consideration paid by the Burger King Corporation.
Most irritating of all is Dawn’s friends’ unwillingness to even think of using the Devilstone to help. Even if (as Mrs. Hatch intimates) the sleeping spell is unbreakable by the simple power of the Devilstone, the girls could still have attempted to use it to guard her, or track her once she disappeared, or neutralize Mercedes somehow before she could cause more damage. Instead, the only thing they do with this magic artifact that seems as powerful as Green Lantern’s ring is make a cardboard crown appear on Michael’s head. Way to go, girls. Woo.
This isn’t the worst, or even one of the worst of the Pulsepounders! features (which just shows you how far down the curve this production franchise was willing to sink). But the reasonably adequate first half just makes the spiraling-down-the-toilet second half seem that much sadder by comparison. In the end, I was trying to make a deal with the movie as it unspooled in front of me: “If you can’t end, could you at least stop?”
Some Notable Totables:
- body count: 0
- breasts: 0
- explosions: 3
- dream sequences: 2
- ominous thunderstorms: 0
- actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0
