I always thought The Craft was one of the best teen movies of the 1990s. It’s hard to make a teen film about witches that is neither too serious to be fun nor too camp to hold any stakes, but Andrew Fleming’s 1996 movie walks that tightrope. This generation could use its own version of The Craft, and while Zoe Lister-Jones’ pandemic-era sequel wasn’t up to the job, Forbidden Fruits is much nearer the mark. On top of that, it’s set in North Texas, so you can catch the movie in its native setting.
Our main characters, Apple, Cherry, and Fig (Lili Reinhart, Victoria Pedretti, and Alexandra Shipp) are all saleswomen at a high-end clothing store called Free Eden. Completing their circle is Pumpkin (Lola Tung from TV’s The Summer I Turned Pretty), who works at the mall’s pretzel stand and walks into the store wearing a paper hat and bearing a tray of free pretzel samples. Despite their aversion to carbs, the ladies believe Pumpkin is fated to become their colleague because she is also named after a fruit. They perform a disgusting induction ceremony involving a spangled cowboy boot and this incantation: “Goat’s milk thigh gaps rose petals bone caps truffle oil bitch slap blood clots juice press.”
The film takes place in Dallas’ Highland Place mall, which you know is fictitious. It looks like NorthPark from the outside but not on the inside. In fact, the movie was shot in Toronto, though someone (either first-time director Meredith Alloway or co-writer Lily Houghton, whose stage play Of the woman came the beginning of sin and through her we all die this is based on) gets the local references right, as Fig informs the Plano native Pum that Apple is from Grapevine and Cherry is from Highland Park, “though she isn’t rich or anything.”
Regardless of who’s writing this, the comic voice here is original and confident, as the witches worship Marilyn Monroe as a martyred saint and think they’re striking a blow against the patriarchy by ordering lattes. The induction ceremony also has Apple telling the other girls “Blow me,” which in this instance means they have to take a puff of her marijuana cigarette and blow the smoke into her mouth. When one customer wants to buy sun protection for her new baby, Apple says, “That’s so thoughtful. If I had a kid, I’d never think about them at all.”
Pumpkin has her own agenda in joining this group, and Apple’s controlling tendencies give her lots to work with, as both of the others are hiding things from her. (Fig turns out to be secretly pursuing a master’s degree in astrophysics, which I wish the movie told us more about.) Then, too, there’s an outcast from the group named Pickle (Emma Chamberlain) who now wanders the mall zombie-like. Pum first sees her banging her head against Free Eden’s shop window.
Having famously played a wallflower on seven seasons of TV’s Riverdale, Reinhart here makes a formidable and funny coven leader, and she’s particularly good during the bloody climax, when the coven and Apple’s sanity both disintegrate while a tornado hits the mall. The visuals don’t match the energy of the story development, but I’m sure budget considerations played a factor in that. I have mixed feelings about the post-credits epilogue, too, when Free Eden’s oft-alluded-to but never-seen store manager finally appears onscreen. (I’ll let you find out who portrays the manager.) Even so, Alloway’s film treatment of Forbidden Fruits is beguiling often enough to make me wonder what she can do with greater resources. Can someone show her the high-end merchandise?
Forbidden Fruits
Starring Lili Reinhart and Lola Tung. Directed by Meredith Alloway. Written by Meredith Alloway and Lily Houghton, based on Houghton’s stage play. Rated R.
