Those who subject us to such movies (parodies of parodies, which seems such an astonishingly moot point) aren't filmmakers but smug con artists who don't entertain and instead rely on our own knowledge of vapid pop culture to do the work for them. We're so familiar with these archetypes -- "The Pretty Ugly Girl," "The Popular Jock," "The Obsessed Best Friend," "The Cruelest Girl," and so forth, as laid out in the press notes -- that the filmmakers need do nothing more than drop them into high-school set pieces. The film could play without sound and we wouldn't miss a beat (or a beating).
Not Another Teen Movie, set at John Hughes High (stop, yer killin' me), is just another teen movie that swipes its central story line from, among so many others, She's All That and Whatever It Takes -- one good-looking guy (Eric Christian Olsen, generic as a bar code) bets another (Chris Evans, Freddie Prinze Jr. Jr.) that he can't transform the beautiful-behind-glasses, ugly-duckling outcast (Chyler Leigh, star of Kickboxing Academy) into prom queen -- and tries to divert your attention by upping the gross-out factor that made mad millions for the Farrellys and the American Pie franchise owners. The result is a crass, dimwitted affair that culminates in a sad cameo by Molly Ringwald. Seventeen years after she blew out her Sixteen Candles, Hughes's poster girl for the alienated teen has been rendered the pathetic punch line in a film that shits on her best work.
Not Another Teen Movie's idea of clever is just adding another pie (for Randy Quaid, the poor bastard), covering an entire classroom in diarrhea, making the foreign exchange student (Areola, "played" by Cerina Vincent) run around nude the entire time, and forcing Samm Levine (from Freaks and Geeks) to play the Jewish kid who thinks he's Japanese and utters lines like, "That make me kind of happy in pants." So, yeah, it's another teen movie, all right -- the worst one ever made, which may just be the point if it's the last one ever made.
