Not Another Teen Movie

The problem with "Not Another Teen Movie" is that it's not cruel enough. This may seem a strange thing to say about a movie whose main characters all suffer horrible injuries, cause someone else to suffer horrible injuries, offer their bodies to the lowest bidder, or get sprayed with excrement, but it's true. These are mere affronts to the flesh. What teen movies really insult is your mind.

Teen movies present a world populated solely by the rail-thin and gorgeous, except when people are specifically designated as unattractive; a world in which the big football game and the posts of Senior Prom King and Queen prompt deceit and subterfuge that would shock Machiavelli; a world of unrestrained, unrepentant, uncommented-on affluence; a world in which people's motives change when the music does, going from devious to loving at the swell of a chord; a world where people going to high school never, ever do homework. No one lives in this world, and no one ever has. It needs to be made to look as ridiculous as it is.

"Not Another Teen Movie" aspires to stick the sharp dagger of satire into these fat, happy movies. Its main target is "She's All That," a reprehensible film in which Freddie Prinze, Jr. takes a bet that he can't transform a rebellious arty girl into someone suitable to reign as Prom Queen. In the course of winning the bet, he stumbles onto the incredibly poorly hidden beauty in Rachel Leigh Cook. The two fall in love. "She's All That" made millions upon millions of dollars. It needs a good smack, and for the most part "Not Another Teen Movie" is fiercely dedicated to providing it, giving us Chris Evans in Prinze's role as fatuous Jake Wyler and Chyler Leigh in Cook's role as vapid Janey Briggs.

As you might expect, the movie also takes swings at other teen effluvia, like "Cruel Intentions," "Varsity Blues" and "Bring It On," and it hits more often than it misses. "American Pie" gets repeatedly dissed, most notably by the inclusion of Aureola, a foreign exchange student who shows up for school buck naked and demurs, "I am so happy to be in America. My breasts are perky, yes?" (I feel hormonally compelled to note that the character of Aureola is spectacularly embodied by Cerina Vincent.)

The sports team of John Hughes High School is called the Wasps ("Rich With Pride"), and the token black guy knows his role and can't stop acidly commenting on how he fills it, saying "Word" right on cue. It's all stupid and it's all ravaged.

The problem is what the film does when it's not parodying teen movies. Two of the five writers (Phil Beauman and Buddy Johnson, if you're keeping score) worked with the troika of Wayanses that made "Scary Movie," and "Not Another Teen Movie" takes that highly profitable opus as its model. (In fact, Shawn and Marlon Wayans were originally slated to make this film, when it was called "Ten Things I Hate About Clueless Road Trips When I Can't Hardly Wait To Be Kissed," but the demand for the unpromised sequel to "Scary Movie" intervened.)

But unlike "Scary Movie," which virtually dismembered its helpless victim films, "Not Another Teen Movie" doesn't go far enough in ripping teen movies to shreds. The film's satiric bloodlust drops off dramatically midway through the movie, and random sex and poop jokes alone are not enough to sustain the film's denouement. The characters occasionally achieve some kind of dignity, which should never happen; in a parody, shouldn't the pathetic horny kid get humiliated in some outré fashion rather than realize his dream? And our quintet of writers, despite some half-hearted mockery and the attempted intervention of Molly Ringwald (who should know), eventually deliver that hoariest of endings: the happy one with the embrace and teary kisses. Oh, puke.

One other thing in this film is a bit curious: a scene in which an English professor discourses on the true nature of humor with cutaways to some serious restroom mishaps. "Shakespeare, Molière, Oscar Wilde - these were humorists," he declaims, just before a toilet crashes through his ceiling and, due to some arcane plumbing malfunction, sprays its contents all over his classroom. The scene was handled with an utter lack of deftness and timing, like almost all the too-numerous excrement jokes in the film.

It made me think of satirists like Aristophanes, Rabelais, Jonathan Swift - these men would have known exactly where to put the exploding toilet, and made it a timeless classic. "Not Another Teen Movie" will do for now—for those of us who hate teen films, it provides some satisfaction, which is better than none—but hopefully we'll get something better, sometime soon.

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