Cast: Chyler Leigh, Jaime Pressly, Chris Evans, Mia Kirshner, Randy Quaid, Ed Lauter, Cerina Vincent
Director: Joel Gallen
Producers: Brad Luff, Neal H. Moritz
Screenplay: Michael G. Bender & Adam Jay Epstein & Andrew Jacobson and Phil Beauman & Buddy Johnson
Cinematography: Reynaldo Villalobos
Music: Theodore Shapiro
U.S. Distributor: Columbia Pictures
Not Another Teen Movie starts with a bad premise, then proceeds to execute it poorly. The movie, directed by MTV veteran spoofer Joel Gallen, takes the unwise approach of parodying a genre that is rife with comedies - the teen romance. So, although there might be limited dividends from poking fun at the likes of "serious" high school movies like She's All That, where's the payoff in lampooning raunchy comedies like American Pie or Road Trip? It takes a talent of Monty Python-ish proportions to satirize a comedy, and no member of the team behind Not Another Teen Movie is up to the challenge. As a result, this movie offers little more than 85 minutes of tedium, with too few weak chuckles to alleviate the boredom.
It's a bad sign that the features Not Another Teen Movie is parodying are funnier than the movie itself. While the primary targets of Gallen's film are the '90s crop of teen flicks, the director and his small army of screenwriters find time to turn back the clock to the '80s, as well. There are references to the John Hughes oeuvre (with cameos by Molly Ringwald and The Breakfast Club's Paul Gleason), as well as the "A-Team" (with a Mr. T cameo), but, probably fearing that 75% of the potential audience was in diapers while Reagan was in office, the filmmakers have concentrated on material from the past three or four years. There are a couple of odd satires - one of the somewhat obscure film Rudy and one out-of-place nod to Almost Famous.
The story is a takeoff on She's All That - Not Another Teen Movie uses the Rachael Leigh Cook/Freddie Prinze Jr. outing as its "inspiration" in the same way that the vastly superior Scary Movie ripped off Scream. So we have all the expected stereotypes running around doing all the expected things - that, after all, is the nature of parodies. The only thing that's missing is the humor. In sheer desperation, the filmmakers resort to the foolish and foolproof last resort of the low-brow comedy: flatulence, excrement, and other gross-out stuff. Enter the bodily fluids, spurting from every orifice! The film's biggest laughs come when gallons of raw sewage are being dumped on several characters and when a high school girl is French kissing (with a lot of saliva) a woman old enough to be her grandmother. Of course, there are also the requisite homophobic and sexually graphic jokes, all of which are retreads of material from previous movies (like the aforementioned American Pie and Road Trip). And there are some curious comic setups that lead nowhere. For example, the film goes to great pains to introduce a cheerleader with Tourette Syndrome, then does nothing with her. She is underutilized and misused, making her inclusion seem distasteful. Had her scenes been funny, the political incorrectness could have been justified, but there's no humor here - just awkwardness. The filmmakers also seem to think that they're pushing an envelope with references to incest and anal sex, but such salacious moments hardly go farther than the two most notorious scenes in American Pie or some of the unmentionable actions committed by Tom Green in Freddy Got Fingered.
As far as the story goes, we are introduced to the Nerdy Girl Who's Really Gorgeous Under the Glasses (Chyler Leigh). She is pursued by the Handsome Jock Who Is Supposed to Resemble Freddy Prinze Jr. (Chris Evans). He has bet his buddies that he can make her the Prom Queen. Of course, he falls for her, and you know the rest. The supporting cast is populated by all sorts of has-beens and probably-never-will-bes. There's the Oversexed, Evil Sister; the Token Black Guy; the Stuck-Up Cheerleader; the Hard-Headed Coach; the Naked Foreign Exchange Student; and the Drunk Dad (played by Randy Quaid, who seems to be reprising his part from the Vacation movies and Independence Day). The joke is supposed to be that all of these people are clichés. The problem is that making them clichés is in itself a cliché.
To be fair to the film, it has its moments - although there aren't many of them. I enjoyed the big musical number near the end, and I liked the way the exchange student's subtitles were arranged so that the writing didn't obscure her breasts. As far as cleverness goes, however, that's about it. Not Another Teen Movie offers little more than a seemingly-endless barrage of recycled jokes that are as mirthless as they are tedious. For anyone with a yearning to see this kind of movie, just watch the preview - with its adept editing, it's about ten times as funny and 50 times shorter than the torturous feature from which it has been assembled.
© 2001 James Berardinelli