I’ll Get You My Pretty! And your little…um, Snake too!
I tell you, being the head of your town’s Parent/Teacher Association is a lot harder than those fibbers on THE WONDER YEARS let on. When you’re not putting ‘Evolution is a Theory, Not a Fact’ stickers on Biology textbooks and FLINSTONES DVDs or making sure that bitch Madge from down the road doesn’t cook more of her cardboard-tasting chocolate crackles for the bake sale (I swear she just cuts the pictures out of the recipe books and puts them on the plate); then you’re hexing the Math teacher to stop him from running any more pop Algebra quizzes until little Johnny’s tutor recovers from the rubella you gave him for being late last week or finding a cheap but still reliable babysitter who doesn’t mind that your baby’s father is the Devil and who knows how to burp a baby with colic and six-inch long horns growing out of his forehead. It’s just such diabolical domestics and magickal mundanity that face the three suburban sorceresses in this week’s offering. So grab some eye of newt, sit on your favourite broom (mind the splinters) and don’t let the toad wart juice ruin your manicure as we bubble up some toil and trouble with EASTWICK (Wed Aug 25, Go! – Midnight).
EASTWICK is clearly trying to capture a target audience somewhere between DESPERATE HOUSEWIVES and TRUE BLOOD (so, someone who gave up watching housewives because Terri Hatcher lost too much weight and wasn’t worth catching and eating anymore). It’s a spin-off of THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK, a genre-hopping cult film from 1987, which possibly makes this the longest wait for a spin-off series in the history of television. 23 years? STAR TREK averages a new spin-off every second Wednesday.
THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK was about three bored housewife types (Cher, Susan Sarandon and Michelle Pfeiffer) in a small American town so sleepy it makes Adelaide look like Manhattan, who gradually realise that they are natural-born sorceresses, and whom can magickally influence the world around them when they’re together. Long story short, the three lonely women, in their quest to find the perfect man, accidentally summon the Devil (Jack Nicholson) as their willing suitor. That goes about as well as you’d anticipate (could have been worse though- they could have been dating Mel Gibson) and the three women end up banishing him back to Hell (strangely enough, also somewhat resembling Adelaide) and are left single mothers to a trio of Beelzee- bubs.
EASTWICK picks up where the ’87 film left off. Roxanne (Rebecca Romjin- fresh from working as Mystique in X-MEN); Joanna (The Bold & The Beautiful’s Lindsay Price) and Kat (Jamie Ray Newman) are getting on with their lives, doing their best to remain friends whilst suppressing their witchy powers and strangely ignoring the Satanic origin of their three, now grown children (much like the Olsen Twin’s parents do).
Suddenly, their powers start activating again- Roxanne finds she can suddenly predict the future and can read minds. She also seems to able to magickally compel gay men to sleep with her, as Matt Dallas (KYLE XY) shows up for a few episodes as her very unconvincing love interest. Joanna, meanwhile, begins to develop telekinesis, the ability to move things with her mind (and she didn’t even have to have pig’s blood dumped on her at a school prom to get it). Kat finds she is suddenly able to manipulate natural phenomena when she experiences strong emotions- she can cause tornados, earthquakes and tsunamis when excited or upset (men who sleep with her get really big egos, as the Earth actually does move for them).
Needless to say, the reason that the three women are getting their SUSPIRIA on again (that’s a witch joke, for those unfamiliar with classic horror films!) is because the Devil has gotten tired of going down to Georgia and has decided to move back to Eastwick to see if his three former girlfriends will go down on him instea…er, to say hi to his kids. Now played by Paul Gross (TALES OF THE CITY, the highly homoerotic DUE SOUTH), Daryl Van Horne is just as diabolically dreamy and hellishly horny as ever, and his arrival triggers a whole lot of supernatural goings on not just limited to the three women. His children start manifesting their inner Rosemary’s Baby, the neighbours start getting possessed by all manner of nasty unnatural entities (demons, ghosts, Intelligent Design advocates, people who watch THE VIEW…) and a rival group of witches comes to town, led by the ruthless but perfectly attired Eleanor (Cult sci-fi/horror actress Veronica Cartwright, who also had a role in the WITCHES OF EASTWICK movie) who are determined to steal Daryl the Devil away for their own nefarious purposes. And as well as having sex with him, they probably want to do some magic too.
Empowered women, hot guys, camp, magick and an extremely horny male lead. Pull up a cauldron and stay for a spell!
Gavin Pitts
