The Screengrab : heathers

Unwatchable #37: “Bad Girls from Valley High”

Scott Von Doviak — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 18:00:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

First let me tell you a little about the movie I won’t be telling you about today. As any loyal Unwatchable reader knows, occasionally the IMDb Bottom 100 list presents us with a stumper. As I consulted the list in preparation for today’s entry, the title at #37 struck me as vaguely familiar: Hababam sinifi 3,5. I checked the archives and sure enough, the originally scheduled title for Unwatchable #59 was Hababam sinifi askerde, an earlier installment in the Hababam sinifi series of Turkish comedies. Apparently there’s a hardcore band of Hababam sinifi haters in Turkey…which doesn’t really help my cause since these movies aren’t available in the U.S. However, I was able to find a few YouTube clips, and I like to think this one captures the essence of whatever it is that makes these movies so hateable:

With that out of the way, it’s time to find a substitute for Unwatchable #37, which I accomplish by consulting the current version of the Bottom 100 list and selecting the first title that does not appear on the list I’ve been working from all along. And that selection, as you already know, is 2005’s Bad Girls from Valley High. A promising title, you might agree, but alas…

Like the earlier Unwatchable The Smokers, what we have here is a “chick clique” flick that draws its meager inspiration from the likes of Heathers and its many imitators. The bee-yootiful Julie Benz (Angel, Dexter), a good decade too old for the role, stars as 17-year-old Danielle, queen bee of Valley Gorge High School. Her obligatory satellites are Tiffany (Nicole Bilderback) and Brooke (Monica Keena), the one with a sliver of a conscience. Danielle may be Miss Popularity, but there’s one thing she wants but doesn’t have: dreamy Drew (former child star Jonathan Brandis). Drew only has eyes for his girlfriend Charity Chase, until the day Danielle and her minions decide to put a scare into her and accidentally cause her to fall to her death.

A year later, the students of Valley Gorge High are still mourning what they think is Charity’s suicide, none more so than Drew. Danielle is ready to make her move on him, but she is thwarted by the arrival of Romanian exchange student Katarina, who soon has Drew emerging from his funk. Danielle plots to get rid of Katarina in similar fashion as Charity, but her efforts are hampered when she, Tiffany and Brooke begin to suffer from humiliating bodily breakdowns. Tiffany’s eyesight worsens, Brooke gets all farty and Danielle starts uncontrollably whizzing herself. The bad girls begin to suspect Katarina is actually Charity’s ghost, and that she’s put a curse on them.

Aside from providing humiliating late career roles for Christopher Lloyd (as a suspicious, accident-prone teacher) and Janet Leigh (as a comatose stroke victim – don’t ask), Bad Girls from Valley High is just the sort of dopey, barely competent high school comedy you’d expect to go straight to video after sitting on a shelf for five years, which it did. The suicide storyline is particularly queasy-making in retrospect, as co-star Brandis killed himself between the time of shooting and the eventual DVD release. I guess I’ll never know whether or not this is a worse movie than Hababam sinifi 3,5; that will simply have to remain one of the enduring mysteries…of the Unwatchable.

Previously on Unwatchable:
38. Chairman of the Board
39. The Invisible Maniac
40. Son of the Mask
41. Troll 2
42. Zombie Nightmare

Screengrab’s Back-To-School Round-Up: The Top 18+ High School Films (Part One)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 20:00:00 GMT

There are two kinds of people in the world: the ones who despised high school and those who actually kinda liked it. Me, I was lucky...I was a geek, but nobody dumped pig’s blood on my head...I had zits but not a pizza face...I didn’t have many girlfriends, but as one of the straight guys in the drama club I did okay...and best of all, I grew up in a town where the rigid caste system of brains, jocks, preps, rebels and burnouts was loose enough for everyone to more or less party together, thanks to the magic of underage drinking and weed.

For some, of course, high school is a harrowing nightmare of alienation and rejection, a crucible that tests the soul (rather than simply a place of tests and The Crucible). But whether you experienced “Glory Days” or a “Teenage Wasteland” (or a little of both), the residue of adolescence is hard to shake: even retirement communities are rife with queen bees and wannabes, and the past three presidential elections (at least) have been structured as showdowns between smartypants teacher’s pets and “bad boys” promising awesome keggers while their parents are out of town.

So join us now as we skip fifth period gym class to bring you a very special tribute to readin’, writin’ and Ritalin: Screengrab + the Greatest High School Movies 4-eva!

REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955)

Almost indisputably the ur-document of teenage cinema, Nicholas Ray's explosive Rebel without a Cause did it all: it made a huge star out of Natalie Wood, and turned James Dean into something even huger than that – an icon. It proved eerily predictive in its on-screen depiction of poor doomed Sal Mineo. It was made at the exact moment in American history when teenagers were making the transformation from an age category to a demographic, and it became the blueprint for a million movies about how parents just don't understand. It became such an essential part of the culture that it falls under that rare category of movies that you know back to front even if you haven’t seen them. Oh, and incidentally, it's a great movie, with electrifying performances by all three leads, and an often-neglected directing job by the masterful Nicholas Ray. Dean's Jim Stark is the archetype of angry, alienated teenagers, and so perfectly does he inhabit the role that it could fairly be said that pretty much every alienated teenager in film history – in fact, every alienated teenager in reality – is just a copy of him. Most of all, Rebel Without a Cause does something quite magical: while never breaking the tensely emotional shell in which it surrounds its characters, while making their emotions as real and weighty as our own, it manages to give the sensation and perspective utterly lacking from their lives, and the lives of every teenager who would ever watch them: that this too would pass, and that the problems that seemed like – and, indeed, were – matters of life and death during high school would seem weightless as a cloud from the perspective of adulthood.

CARRIE (1976)

There are those who think Brian De Palma is a genius and those who find his "operatic" style overwrought and often downright silly, and 99 times out of 100 you can put me in the latter camp. Yet there was at least one occasion when De Palma's hyper-melodramatic emotionalism perfectly matched the source material: Stephen King's seminal "revenge of the nerd" tale Carrie. In high school, after all, every little slight, snub, or misunderstanding feels like a matter of life and death, and our most embarrassing moments seem to go on for hours – at least for those of us who weren't born to be the quarterback or the prom queen. De Palma conveys that hormones-gone-mad sensibility as if he's undergone some kind of regression therapy, particularly in the movie's two most famous set-pieces. The opening, set in the girls' locker room, transitions from woozy wet dreamland to literal bloody terror without missing a beat, while the pigs-blood prom sequence holds every agonizing note of a symphony of mortification before giving way to Carrie's deadly (but undeniably cathartic) retribution. It's the ultimate high-school-as-horror movie – because when you're 16 or so, it's hard to think of six more terrifying words than "They're all gonna laugh at you."

FAST TIMES AT RIDGEMONT HIGH (1982)

This late-summer teen comedy was released into the teeth of critics who regarded it as a mall-filler and promotional device for the soundtrack album, a judgment that was probably shared by the studio that released it. It quickly rode to cult status on the strength of its genuine affection for its young characters and the gentle but incisive touch of director Amy Heckerling and her screenwriter, Cameron Crowe, as well as a sprawling, talented ensemble cast. At the time, it was seen as the movie that made Sean Penn a star, and his Jeff Spicoli -- Shaggy with a surfboard instead of a crime-solving dog and a Volkswagen Microbus with a well-toasted aroma -- remains a classic comic stoner archetype. Now, though, the movie looks like one of those pictures that in one sweep introduced a generation's worth of new faces, including Forest Whitaker (as the token black football player who one kid assumes they just chauffeur in for the games), Jennifer Jason Leigh, Phoebe Cates, Judge Reinhold, Eric Stoltz, Anthony Edwards, and, in a teensy feature debut, an actor with a long face and good family connections who for the first and only time in his career was billed "Nicolas Coppola." Heavy rotation on HBO proceeded to practically burn it into the DNA of '80s kids, who used their new VCRs to make a close study of Reinhold's masturbation fantasy of a topless Phoebe Cates emerging from the swimming pool, a sequence that made budding cineastes of many an appreciative young male.

HEATHERS (1989)

"Dear Diary," writes Ronnie Sawyer in her journal, in the goth-comedy that launched a thousand imitators, "my teen angst has a body count." That's as good a way as any to describe Heathers, the surprisingly subversive – and even more surprisingly successful – teen comedy that made a huge star of Winona Ryder (and threatened to do the same for Christian Slater, until he had the good taste to appear in several more movies so we could all see how ridiculous it was for him to go around claiming to be an actor). Ryder's character just wants to fit in with her high school's elite (the titular Heathers), but she's got a nasty independent streak and a Bud Cortish hobby of faking suicide, so it looks like she might be caught between her own desires and the intractable social demands of high school forever – until the dreamy Jason Dean shows up, determined to cut the Gordian knot of teen angst, no matter how many people he has to kill to do it. Heathers has plenty of problems, from its highly improbable plot to its pat ending to, well, basically everything involving Christian Slater; but the reason it grabbed us then is the reason it holds up now. It's an unsparing look at the ludicrously overblown and arbitrary pressures of high school social life, wrapped up in an extremely funny package courtesy of screenwriter Daniel Waters. It may not be as deep as it thinks it is, but it's got a nasty attitude and it's got tons of great lines, and once you're actually out of high school, and you realize life doesn't really depend on being cool, that's enough.

Click Here for Part Two, Part Three & Part Four

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Leonard Pierce, Scott Von Doviak, Phil Nugent

Unwatchable #80: “The Smokers”

Scott Von Doviak — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:30:00 GMT

Our fearless – and quite possibly senseless – movie janitor is watching every movie on the IMDb Bottom 100 list. Join us now for another installment of Unwatchable.

Take a look at that DVD cover and you’ll probably think you have a pretty good idea what to expect from The Smokers – a “chick clique” flick in the vein of Heathers, Mean Girls and Jawbreaker. At times it does play like that sort of movie, but at other times, it strives to present some big ideas. Some big, dumb ideas.

The Smokers was clearly made by someone who once read that a gun introduced in the first act must go off in the third, but didn’t get much beyond that chestnut as far as the finer points of storytelling are concerned. When it was over, I immediately went to the IMDb to find out who was responsible and what else they might have done. The writer/director in question is one Kat Slater, and here are some of the films she has made since The Smokers: Young Sluts, Inc. 4, Young Sluts, Inc. 6, Cum Swappers 1, Cum Swappers 2, Cum Swallowers, Cum Swallowers 3 and Campus Confessions 6-9. Those titles being a little too subtle for me, I did some research and it turns out they’re all hardcore porn releases from Hustler. I found this a bit surprising, given the extreme feminist ideas explored in The Smokers, but as I believe I mentioned, they are very dumb feminist ideas, explored very poorly.

The Smokers are Jefferson (Dominique Swain, Adrian Lyne’s Lolita), Karen (Busy Phillips of Freaks and Geeks) and Lisa (Keri Lynn Pratt, Miss Teen New Hampshire 1994), three students at the upscale boarding school Lindenhurst Academy. They smoke. They smoke a lot. They smoke the cigarettes and they smoke the pot. Also, they have boy troubles. Lisa’s boyfriend David cheats on her, Jefferson falls for a gay singer and Karen gets the brush-off after a one-night stand in the back of a limo. After Jefferson’s wacko sister Lincoln (where have you gone, Thora Birch?) pulls a gun on Karen (all in good fun, of course), the Smokers decide to use the weapon to turn the tables on the male of the species.

Thanks to the movie’s wildly inconsistent tone, it’s hard to say how we’re supposed to take this development. Is it just a goof when they sexually humiliate David at gunpoint, or is it rape? If it is just a goof and we’re meant to take it all lightly, what about the later scene in which Karen is date-raped on the hood of her one-night stand’s limo? It’s a disturbing moment deprived of any meaningful context. If The Smokers can’t decide how it feels about its own message of empowerment – that is, whether it’s a satirical take or a cautionary tale or even a genuine call to arms – then how are we supposed to figure it out? It’s not that the movie is being deliberately ambiguous, it’s just inept filmmaking hardly aided by unappealing performances, notably by the shrill Phillips.

I did find one hint as to the filmmaker’s intentions after the fact. If you check out the Amazon customer reviews of The Smokers, you’ll find this comment from one Kat Slater: “Finally a chic flick without all the wimpy girls. These girls are cool. It's very stylish and great preformances by Thora Birch and Dominique Swain. I loved it! And guys... you want to see what girls are all about... this is it!” So…this is the same person who went on to make movies with titles referring to women as semen receptacles? I think I’m more confused than ever.

Previously on Unwatchable:
81. Soccer Dog: The Movie
82. American Soldiers
83. First Sunday
84. It’s Pat
85. Battlefield Earth

Vanishing Act: Daniel Waters

Scott Von Doviak — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 18:00:00 GMT

Diablo Cody, take notice. Once upon a time, in a magical land called the 1980s, there was a hip youth-culture screenwriter of the moment named Daniel Waters. He wrote a zeitgeisty movie called Heathers that Variety described as “super-smart black comedy about high school politics and teenage suicide that showcases a host of promising young talents.” Among those talents were Christian Slater, unveiling the Jack Nicholson impression that would sustain his career at least until the release of Kuffs in 1992, future 90210 bad girl Shannen Doherty, and future shoplifter Winona Ryder, who was sort of the Ellen Page of her time. Heathers was a cult hit, and Waters got the lion’s share of the credit. (Director Michael Lehmann’s recent comeback attempt Flakes was described here as a “soggy mess.”)

Waters used his newfound clout to pen two of the most reviled movies (justly or not) of the early 1990s: the Andrew Dice Clay vehicle The Adventures of Ford Fairlane and notorious bomb Hudson Hawk. He managed to reclaim a modicum of respectability by scripting Batman Returns (although much of his work went unused), then did some work on 1993’s Demolition Man before disappearing for eight years. He resurfaced with his debut as a writer-director, Happy Campers, a sort of cross between Heathers and Meatballs that never received a theatrical release.

Another long hiatus followed, but now the L.A. Times catches up with Waters, who has a new movie due in theaters Friday. Sex and Death 101 reunites him with Winona Ryder for the story of a man (Simon Baker) who receives a mysterious email listing all the women he ever has or ever will have sex with. As it happens, Waters has taken up residence in the former home of another man who was no stranger to prolonged vanishing acts, Orson Welles. "I bought the house because I wanted to get that Citizen Kane mojo," says Waters. "Instead I'm getting the end of [Welles'] career, the hanging out with Henry Jaglom, doing wine commercials and magic tricks part of his life. I mean, I enjoy my life, but come on -- where's my Touch of Evil?"

Like Welles before him, Waters also keeps busy “on never-made projects like an adaptation of Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land for Tom Hanks.” Is Sex and Death 101 his Touch of Evil? Here’s the trailer – judge for yourself: