In the opening scenes of "The Craft," a teenage girl and herfamily move into a vast, crumbling old mansion, overgrown with vines andapparently set within decaying wetlands. Soon an ominous man arrives at thedoor, holding a snake. Soon he leaves. The teenager, named Sarah (Robin Tunney),decides to go to school even though she doesn't have her uniform yet. Herstepmother drops her off at a Catholic high school in a posh section of LosAngeles. Where, exactly, in Los Angeles are there Gothic mansions in bayoucountry? Even the La Brea Tar Pits are landscaped. Never mind. The mansion is essentially making a guest appearance, asatmosphere. It establishes a pattern: Many of the scenes in this movie have noattention span--do not remember any of the other scenes--and exist only on theirown terms. In the high school, we meet three other teenage girls: Nancy (FairuzaBalk), Bonnie (Neve Campbell) and Rochelle (Rachel True). They are witches. "Thefourth is arriving," Nancy intuits. I thought witches came in threes, butno: You need one for each of the four points of the compass.

Sarah has potential. While bored in French class, she balances a pencil onits top and makes it spin by mind-power alone. A boy in the class named Chris(Skeet Ulrich) calls her "snail trail" and is mean to her, but soonshe will have him under her spell, and Chris won't be graduating with the restof his class.

The girls are all outsiders. Their classmates don't like them, which seemsstrange, since they have messy hair, slather on black lipstick, wear leather dogcollars, smoke a lot, have rings piercing many of the penetrable parts of theirbodies, sneer constantly, and, in short, look like normal, popular teenagers. AtSt. Benedict's Academy, though, they're known as "The Bitches of Eastwick." Sarah seems like a nice enough girl, but she grows depressed at beingtreated in an unfriendly fashion at the new school, and is soon recruited by thewitches--who do, in fact, have a lot of magical powers. "As above, sobelow," they chant, and other stuff, while we witness levitation, clouds ofbutterflies, telekinesis, and other manifestations of the supernatural. One thing you have to give them: They're practical, and use witchcraft todeal with their problems. Bonnie has scars from burns, but is able to erasethem. Rochelle, who is black, is the subject of racist taunts from a blondegirl, whose hair falls out and is replaced by sores. And Nancy transformsherself into a Sarah clone and throws herself (literally, and at high speed) atChris.

What I have always wondered about supernatural characters in movies is whytheir horizons are so limited. Here are four girls who could outgross DavidCopperfield in Vegas, and they limit their amazing powers to getting even. Theplot, in short, is beneath our interest. What is intriguing is that the four actresses succeed in playing theircharacters as realistic modern teenagers--the underside of the coin from "Clueless."All four are convincing performers, Balk relishes her character's loathsomebehavior, and Rachel True has the sunniest smile since Doris Day. The movie'sfailure is one of imagination. It tilts too far in the direction of horror andspecial effects, when it might have been more fun to make a satirical comedyabout punk teenagers.