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The scariest thing about this movie is that director Joe Gallen had to get four (count 'em! four!) writers to put together this pile of crap that has the arrogance to pass itself off as a genuine satire of the teeny-bopper movies flooding the market within the past two or three years. Add to that the putrid references to the heyday of John Hughes and you come up with a movie that will get every amateur screenwriter exclaiming "I coulda written that!" and every child of the eighties mourning for a lost decade of wit and wisdom in the juvenile-directed market.
The movie doesn't parody the movies it purports to parody (mostly American Pie and Can't Hardly Wait, as far as my muddled memory can tell) as much as it simply imitates them: Janey Briggs (Chyler Leigh) is a pretty girl who wears glasses, a ponytail and paint-smeared overalls and has an alcoholic, white trash father (Randy Quaid). Jake Wyler (Chris Evans) is the popular jock who makes a bet to make her over into Prom Queen. Janey has an obseessed best friend pawing after her (Eric Jungmann) while Jake has his own sister a.k.a. "The Cruelest Girl" (Mia Kirshner) pawing after him. Meanwhile, three horny freshmen (Sam Levine, Sam Huntington, Cody McCains) make a pact to lose their virginity by the Prom ("But we make this pact every year!" one of them complains), the Token Black Guy (Deon Richmond) remains philosophical about his role amongst all these pretty white kids with problems, and the Bitchy Cheerleader (Jaime Pressly) is...well, a Bitchy Cheerleader. We've all known them. Some of us may even have dated one (heh heh).
The movie does have its moments, mostly with one-liners from several of the supporting cast. Ox (Huntington) exclaims joyously over never having "to put on blindfolds while we jerk each other off" while Austin, the Cocky Blonde Guy (Eric Olsen) gives off several hysterically unclever/clever revelations about his plot about the bet (I only wish I could quote it verbatim--it's almost worth the \$6.50 Tso paid for me to get in there). But as we all know, one-liners, no matter how clever, cannot sustain a movie based entirely upon them, especially when they mock so many other bad movies. The list is too exhaustive to even attempt to count, but the inclusion of some of John Hughes' more memorable movies is almost insulting: Hughes was after laughs first, drama second. Recent teen movie directors are after the gross-out, the sex and poopie jokes, or a hint of drama, whichever comes first. In places, Not Another Teen Movie doesn't even try to make fun of Hughes--it just repeats him verbatim. Come on, Gallen. What are you, chicken? Didn't all those years at MTV doing swimsuit shows and booty-shots teach you anything about what Moliere called "the deadening of the moral wit?"
Normally with bad parodies (Jane Austen's Mafia; Wrongfully Accused),
my advice is to go out and see the original. Here, I can't even make that
claim; I've seen enough of Can't Hardly Wait, She's All That
and Cruel Intentions (while I had free HBO, thank you very much)
to know fully well what piles of dog crap they are. A movie making fun
of them insults me with the assumption that I didn't know that in the first
place. Teen movies are, obviously enough, not what they used to be, but
an even scarier thought is what they're turning into. In another ten years,
I doubt if Not Another Teen Movie will be listed as a parody;
pop culture researchers will see little difference it and its purported
"satirical targets." I eagerly await the sequel: Popular Boy (James Van
Der Berk) scores with Popular Girl (Shannon Elizabeth) but finds out he's
gay; horny bored friends make a bet with Popular Girl to cure him of this
affliction; one of the friends scores with Popular Boy. The only part that
scares me in contemplating this is what sorts of movies will have to be
made for this sort of satire to happen.
-Long
Copyright 2002 Tso Long Productions ©