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  Midnight Offerings Which witch is which?
Year: 1981
Director: Rod Holcomb
Stars: Melissa Sue Anderson, Mary Elizabeth McDonough, Patrick Cassidy, Marion Ross, Gordon Jump, Cathryn Damon, Ray Girardin, Peter MacLean, Jack Garner, Dana Kimmell, Jeff Mackay, Kym Karath
Genre: Horror, TV MovieBuy from Amazon
Rating:  5 (from 1 vote)
Review: High school bitch Vivian Sotherland (Melissa Sue Anderson) is an actual witch who uses her supernatural powers to kill any student or schoolteacher that gets in her way. After the latest freak death, Vivian’s football hero boyfriend David Sterling (Patrick Cassidy) has had enough of her homicidal ways. He takes a shine to the new girl at school, Robin Prentiss (Mary Elizabeth McDonough), which does not go down well with his Satan worshipping ex-girlfriend. But when Vivian tries her black magic trickery she discovers Robin is a witch too. Nice girl Robin needs to learn how to hone her witchy powers before Vivian casts her deadly spell.

From the Seventies to the early Eighties, American television networks regularly ran a spooky TV movie of the week. Some were genuinely scary and suspenseful while others are more fondly remembered as examples of creepy kitsch, not least because of their casts of familiar faces. Midnight Offerings pits Little House on the Prairie star Melissa Sue Anderson against Mary Elizabeth McDonough a.k.a. the cute one from The Waltons and is so full of sitcom stars it is more like a window into a bizarre parallel world where Marion Ross from Happy Days plays a friendly occultist known-it-all, W.K.R.P. Gordon Jump plays Vivian’s blindly besotted father, and Soap’s Cathryn Damon essays her morally conflicted mom. The latter is revealed to be a witch herself, who renounced her powers and settled into a quiet suburban life, much to Vivian’s disgust, leaving the plot looking almost like a dark spin-off from the sitcom Bewitched wherein baby Tabitha has grown up very nasty indeed.

In fact this Stephen J. Cannell production was an original story penned by Juanita Bartlett, who wrote many episodes for one of the greatest television shows of all time: The Rockford Files. Bartlett’s screenplay draws a little from Carrie (1976), but also anticipates The Craft (1996), Eko Eko Azarak: Wizard of Darkness (1995) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996-2003), by putting a supernatural slant on teenage angst. Both Vivian and Robin are drawn as outsiders, equally eager to carve a better life following past tragedy although their attitudes diverge. While the leads are solid and the film adopts a winningly even-handed view of witchcraft considering the tabloid hysteria whipped up in the Eighties, the characters are largely whiny, self-absorbed daytime soap opera clichés unable to involve us in their high school woes.

Both Anderson and McDonough were major teen idols at the time. Eager to shed their squeaky clean image, each tried their hand at horror: Anderson with deranged slasher flick Happy Birthday to Me (1981) and McDonough with Embalmed (1983), notable for its villain played by a young Bill Paxton, and the offbeat black comedy-monster movie Mom (1991). Neither really escaped the shadows cast by their iconic television roles, but McDonough became a regular in teen comedies of the period and later made inroads into writing and directing, while Anderson also ventured into producing. Then fresh off an Emmy win for Which Mother is Mine? (1979), Anderson is especially good as a sort of Sabrina the Teenage Witch gone off the rails, sporting severely cropped hair, spooky eyes and a near permanent scowl. Meanwhile McDonough remains a winning presence even if Robin is rather too passive a heroine, aside from one memorable telekinetic duel with power tools in the woodwork room.

Some of the satanic mumbo jumbo sits uneasily beside moments of Disneyesque whimsy more akin to Bedknobs and Broomsticks (1971), while the witches’ powers manifest in rather humdrum ways. Nevertheless, this is inventively shot for a television film of its vintage, with numerous Dutch angles and creepy P.O.V shots complimented by Hector Figueroa’s moody lighting, injecting a frisson of spookiness to otherwise tepid affair.

Reviewer: Andrew Pragasam

 

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