Video Reviews : ****Excellent***Good**Fair*Poor : <i> Recent videocassette releases, reviewed by Times critics.</i> : Movies

** 1/2 “The Witches of Eastwick.”

Warner. $89.95. 1987. R.

Under director George Miller (“Mad Max”), this film begins so promisingly, has such smashing separate moments, so succulent a cast (Cher, Jack Nicholson, Susan Sarandon, Michelle Pfeiffer, Veronica Cartwright) and so interesting a premise--three lovely single women meeting up with the devil himself--that watching it crumble into stomach-turning crudeness and “Poltergeist”-scale special effects is deeply painful. Yet whatever the movie’s failings--and they are monumental--the moment in which the devil throws the definitive post-Freudian male fit, his face screwed up in awful self-pity, makes “The Witches of Eastwick” worth all we must endure in between.