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Beautiful Creatures | 2013 | PG-13 | - 5.5.4

A young woman (Alice Englert) is a caster of spells who falls in love with a human (Alden Ehrenreich). She must choose to join her family's witch coven or take a new path and that choice is complicated when the young man discovers that his own family harbors dark secrets. Based on the first book in Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl's eponymous young-adult series. Also with Emma Thompson, Jeremy Irons, Viola Davis, Emmy Rossum and Thomas Mann. Directed by Richard LaGravenese. [2:04]

SEX/NUDITY 5 - A young man and a young woman kiss passionately beside a road: they lean up against a wooden sign that catches fire with large flames and smoke (neither is injured) and they continue to kiss as they back up toward a bench and disappear below the frame (sex is implied).
 A young man and a young woman hold hands and kiss passionately in several scenes, and they each tell the other that they are in love. A woman wearing a black ball gown stands in an alley under a lamp and a teen boy approaches her; she kisses him passionately as the scene ends. A woman wearing a long transparent lace dress approaches a teen boy exercising outside on the football field with classmates and kisses him on the mouth. A teen boy and a teen girl lie clothed on a raft on a river, and embrace and kiss.
 A woman kneels on a blanket in the woods and removes her shawl and blouse with her back to the camera; we see patterns (scars) on her bare back along with her bare shoulders and arms (her chest is completely covered in beads, fiber braids and chains and her body from the waist-down is below the frame). A woman wears a long transparent lace gown over something like a one-piece leather swimsuit featuring a large cutout area above the bosom to reveal cleavage. Three women wear long gowns with low-cut necklines that reveal cleavage; one of the women is rotund and her cleavage is particularly large. A woman wears a low-cut, long, tight formal gown that reveals bare arms and shoulders and cleavage. A woman wears a very short dress that reveals her bare legs to the thigh along with cleavage above a scoop neckline. A teen boy wears a T-shirt and knee-length shorts in bed. A teen girl wears several long shifts that reveal bare shoulders and arms. We see a sculpture of a nude woman's bust in close-up. Several boys exercise on a football field while wearing tank tops and shorts that reveal bare shoulders, arms and legs.
 Choking is discussed in a high school class and a boy says to a girl, "We all know what you choke on" (a sexual implication) and the girl becomes angry. A young man asks a teenage witch, "Can you make everything grow?" (implying sexual organs). A man says that the women in town are sexually frustrated housewives with ballooning backsides and miniscule minds. A woman tells a teen girl that there is no such thing as love and that it is only a concept men give to women in order to use them for sex and keep them busy at home, daydreaming.
 A teen boy has recurring dreams of a clothed teen girl whose face he cannot see.

VIOLENCE/GORE 5 - In a supernatural event, two teen boys in a Civil War reenactment shoot at one another and one is hit by a real bullet in the heart (we see a lot of blood), a teen girl at the far end of the field feels the pain and groans, the wounded boy falls, turns into an elderly man and dies in the arms of his teen niece (she is crying) and the same elderly man runs toward the camera and transforms into the man's nephew; upset, the teen girl removes the moon from the sky with her hand and it disappears, she points at a teen boy and he is thrown back unconscious (but unhurt), she points at a witch who cracks with black crack marks and vine-like growths extending out toward the camera and a black witch shape flies out of the woman and smashes against a wall to disintegrate into old gray vines hanging on bricks.
 A Civil War charm causes vivid flashbacks of a burning plantation and a battlefield strewn with soldiers' bodies when both a teen boy and a teen girl hold the charm at once: we see three of the same flashbacks, one in a theater where it replaces the movie and fills the auditorium with black smoke, as well as showing a woman running between the bodies of dead soldiers on a battlefield and finding her fiancé, whose face is bloody and he is dead; she brings him back to life with an incantation, then transforms into an evil witch and as he comes back to life, chokes him to death causing a teen girl to scream and walk out of the auditorium.
 A Civil War battle reenactment looks real, with men falling as if dead across a large field; smoke fills the air and cannon fire and rifle fire are loud, and one teen boy learns from a witch how to materialize a real bullet into his hand.
 A skeleton hangs in a tree outside a house on Halloween; a woman goes to the door of the house with brownies and her plate explodes into lightning after a teen boy answers the door and she cracks apart with wide black cracks and black roots covering her.
 In a flashback scene, we see a woman suffer a seizure with some trembling while standing by a railroad track and staring at a full moon; her eyes begin to turn gold and sparkle as a young man walks toward her from across the tracks and the young man stops on the tracks and is run over by a train (we see only the train passing). A deputy sheriff chasing a speeder turns red in the face, crashes his vehicle off the side of an embankment and presumably dies; the car smokes, but we see nothing else as the scene ends. A young man driving on a rainy road nearly runs over a young woman standing beside her broken down car; he gets out of the car and they argue about his driving.
 Several witches and warlocks lose their tempers violently, screaming whirling, groaning and threatening destruction. Several witches and warlocks in various scenes extend a hand forward to throw invisible energy at a person or object in order to send it flying and some of these scenes include high winds and electric bolts. Several scenes depict a woman or a man gathering a large swarm of tiny black insect-like entities to engulf an enemy and swallow or destroy the other person. Throughout the film, witches and warlocks vie for the loyalty and commitment of a teenaged witch.
 Several mean high school girls make loud, rude comments in a classroom about a new girl, saying that she is weird and a Satanist; the girl they are referring to becomes angry and all the windows of the room blow inward and break (we see several small cuts on all some faces, a tiny bit of blood on several faces and then later a gauze bandage on one person's wrist, but no blood).
 A young man gets caught in a witch's spell and sees himself face-to-face; he falls to the ground, where black roots reach up and cover his body until a young woman casts another spell to release him, gathering the roots into her hands and disappearing them across a field. A woman causes a large dining table where several men and women are seated to spin and high winds to blow; the floor spins in the other direction for a few minutes and when all the spinning stops, a teen boy falls from a chair, in a trance and is put to bed (he is unharmed). A young woman makes vines grow up her outside wall for a young man to use as a ladder. A teen girl is able to control the weather by causing lightning, thunder, rain, snow and a tornado; the tornado sweeps across a Civil War battle reenactment, scattering people as a teacher wearing a black eye patch shouts at everyone (no one is injured). A young man and a young woman kiss beside a road and as they lean up against a wooden sign it catches fire with large flames and smoke (neither is injured). A young man driving down a road away from the audience sees a large charred wooden road sign, and the car skids to a stop; he gets out of the car, faces the camera and shouts the name of a teen girl to end the scene. A teen witch is surrounded by a force field created by three adult witches as they circle around her and spread lightning bolts between their hands in the circle.
 A mother hits her teen son on the head with a wooden cross before sending him to school, because he got up from kneeling in prayer too soon. A witch whacks her teen son on the back of the head at dinner.
 A seer shows a young man and a young woman secret rooms under a library; we see sculptures of snakes on pillars breathe and hiss and a blank Book of Moons reveals text and diagrams to the young woman; when the young man touches another book, it shocks him and he yells "Ouch!" A witch in a church calls up dark clouds and asks a friend to return to the dark side with her, but he refuses; they argue briefly and she shouts that she is tired of hiding as a witch.
 A young man and a young woman argue several times about relationships, friendships and love. A young man says he dreams of a young woman every night and then dies in the dream (we do not see his death); and that he imagines he's dead because his hometown is so boring. We hear that two parents died in a fire and that a mother died in a traffic accident. We hear that a young man must die in order to break a family curse, but this does not occur. We hear a witch say that humans want only to kill and destroy one another. We see a small town graveyard as people walk through it. A teen boy says to another teen boy, "Some girls are mad dogs -- either shoot or run." We hear that a woman that was the host vessel to a witch was committed to a sanitarium. A young man under mind control or hypnosis by a witch says he will become a drunk and get a divorce before suffering two heart attacks and hanging himself by age 64.
 At a gravesite in the woods, a woman leaves a food offering on a short unmarked headstone (a food offering of banana cream pie and casseroles is used in a magic spell to communicate with the dead). A woman places a large strawberry into her mouth while driving and then spits it out on the window.

LANGUAGE 4 - 1 obscene hand gesture, 8 scatological terms, 7 anatomical terms, 22 mild obscenities, exclamations (shut ups), name-calling (weird, crazy, nuts, stupid, genius, mortal, brat, spoiled, witch, Satanist, devil worshipper, jerk, jock, prom king, chump, fools, cracker, snob, freak, Democrat, homosexual, liberal), stereotypical references to men, women, teens in love, family secrets, small towns, Southerners, Fundamentalist Christians, conservatives, witches, human beings, people who are different, African-American seers, Civil War re-enactors, bullies, 3 religious profanities, 10 religious exclamations.

SUBSTANCE USE - A man offers to donate land to a town for a drug rehab center. Wine is poured for dinner guests and but no is shown drinking it, three teen or college-aged men drink beer from bottles as they walk down a street at night, we hear that a young man's father used to drink heavily, and a young man under mind control or hypnosis by a witch says he will become a drunk and get a divorce before suffering two heart attacks and hanging himself by age 64.

DISCUSSION TOPICS - Witchcraft, magic, fantasy, religions, legends, good vs. evil, fate, individual choice, decision making, loyalty, relationships, family secrets, personal responsibility.

MESSAGE - You are responsible for making your own life choices.

CAVEATS

Be aware that while we do our best to avoid spoilers it is impossible to disguise all details and some may reveal crucial plot elements.

We've gone through several editorial changes since we started covering films in 1992 and older reviews are not as complete & accurate as recent ones; we plan to revisit and correct older reviews as resources and time permits.

Our ratings and reviews are based on the theatrically-released versions of films; on video there are often Unrated, Special, Director's Cut or Extended versions, (usually accurately labelled but sometimes mislabeled) released that contain additional content, which we did not review.


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