The Spell

As a corpulent teen coming of age in the 1980s, your Aunt John's only recourse for attaining peer acceptance was to wear black on the outside (to hide the fat on the inside), and to become a devotee of Siouxsie Sioux. Based on the 1977 TV movie THE SPELL, the way the social pecking order worked was apparently somewhat different for high school girls of a certain weight in Southern California in the late ‘70s. Our flick focuses on Rita, a big girl forced to live in the anorexic shadow of her foxy younger sister, played by the 1970s welfare-to-work-mother's answer to Jodie Foster – HELEN HUNT, and her ginger-locked ice queen of a mother, the questionably beautiful LEE GRANT (seriously, does anyone out there in KINDERTRAUMA land consider Ms. Grant pretty)? The movie commences with our pleasantly plump protagonist, clad in the requisite dumpy-pants gray sweat suit, being asked to climb the rope in gym class. While being audibly tormented by her classmates, who are all wearing sexy, crotch-cut Spandex unitards, young Rita steps up to rope while her arch nemesis executes some sort of Cirque du Soleil aerial maneuver high above the gymnasium floor. One side look from Rita at the Illeana Douglas-looking lady gym teacher, and the mean, skinny girl falls to the ground like an undernourished sack of potatoes. At home, Rita doesn't fare much better with her looks-obsessed lawyer father scolding her for asking for seconding helpings, and scheming to ship her plus-sized patootie off to a boarding school in England. Rita strikes back by sneaking out the house late at night in a Stevie Nicks cape for bewitching trysts with the aforementioned lady gym teacher, needle pointing an awesome Persian Cat handicraft, combusting some neighbor woman who saw her mingling with the lady gym teacher, and using her powers to nearly drown her waif-like little sister at a swim meet. The movie concludes with the most awesome mother/daughter showdown set in a 1970s open-air kitchen, and let's just say that the only supernatural force at work here kept Ms. Grant's ginger bob from moving. That shit looks like helmet.Speaking of which, please help us out with our first ever KINDERTRAUMA poll:

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