THE SPELL is a straight-up TV movie rip-off of CARRIE, albeit made on a smaller scale and lower budget and without the genius of Brian De Palma at the helm. Rita is an ordinary teenage high school pupil who gets bullied by her peers for being overweight (which she isn't, of course). It turns out that a dysfunctional home life doesn't help much. To this end she develops her psychic powers to a degree that she can cause harm to those who oppose her, and black magic may be involved. This is a familiar kind of movie that nonetheless benefits from a typical '70s-era spooky atmosphere, a dedicated Lee Grant (who was always in some misfortune in the 1970s, it seems) and some effective set-pieces, not least the bit with the woman with the boiling blood which is still shocking even now in a pre-EVIL DEAD kind of way.
Review of The Spell
