For Valentine’s Day Weekend 2013: Witches, Zombies, Nicholas Sparks, and "Die Hard"

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It’s Valentine’s/Presidents Day Weekend 2013, and your lover or spouse wants you to spend money on a night on the town. For some, that might involve a couple of hours together in a crowded air-conditioned chain movie theater, gorging yourself on pails of butter-slathered junk food.

If that’s your reality, here are the options, three of which were released on Valentine’s Day.

The first is Beautiful Creatures (Warner Brothers, 124 min.), a new romantic fantasy about a young human boy falling head over heels for a young female witch in rural South Carolina. (In the Beautiful Creatures universe, good witches prefer the more politically correct term “caster.”) The film is a irreverent and genuinely interesting entry into the ever-bloated “Teen-Human-Falls-In-Forbidden-Love-With-Teen-Supernatural-Being” subgenre, so comparisons to the über-profitable Twilight franchise are inevitable, and the studio’s ad campaign predictably tries to make Beautiful Creatures look like as much like Twilight as possible.

Such comparisons are bunk. Unlike any of the five movies in the Twilight saga, Beautiful Creatures is funny, sexy, and not a heaving pile of savage unbearability. And unlike any of the various Twilights, the cast here is uniformly excellent (Viola Davis, Emmy Rossum, Emma Thompson, Jeremy Irons, Zoey Deutch, and the two romantic leads Alden Ehrenreich and Alice Englert).

It’s more fitting to compare Beautiful Creatures to two other films also now in theaters. The newly released (and quite lovely) Warm Bodies—a romantic zombie comedy that includes the best use of Bruce Springsteen music in recent cinema—is essentially the same movie as Beautiful Creatures, if you swap the latter’s witches for zombies. Both films are human/non-human teen romances, are based on a novel, are helmed by a talented writer/director, have an Australian actress in the lead female role, and were released within a few weeks of each other. You could also appropriately compare Beautiful Creatures to the new 3D action flick Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, seeing as how both films prominently feature a Bloodlusting Witch Hitler -type character (Emma Thompson plays the genocidal witch character in the former, Famke Janssen in the latter).

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For Valentine’s Day Weekend 2013: Witches, Zombies, Nicholas Sparks, and "Die Hard"

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