Not Another Teen Movie
It’s a fact of life: some movies get better the more you watch them while others lose their appeal with each successive viewing.
Unfortunately, Not Another Teen Movie, out December 14 by first-time director Joel Gallen and starring Chyler Leigh and Chris Evans, falls into the latter category.
Audiences liked it the first time they saw it, when it was titled Scary Movie. They found it a little old when it came out on video as Scary Movie 2, and by the time they see it under the title Not Another Teen Movie, they know all of the jokes.
The main plot is a simplified version of She’s All That, with Evans as the popular jock, and Leigh as the rebellious-girl-turned-prom-queen. However, because of the sketch-like quality of the film, there are more sub-plots than the target demographic will be able to follow. These diversions parody almost every teen movie of the past two decades that the “Scary Movie” family skipped (though in the same fashion), from The Breakfast Club to Varsity Blues.
The lack of originality doesn’t mean Teen Movie isn’t enjoyable. With the teen-spoof genre (truly its own genre now), you have to walk into the theater knowing what to expect: You will not see any solid acting performances. You will not be touched emotionally. You will not get any brownie points from your date. What you will get is an hour and a half of toilet humor designed to shock teenage boys. It’s a wonderful humorous escape from reality. And, on this scale, Teen Movie provides the goods, throwing in the gratuitous nudity that Scary Movie left out.
But while parts of it are funny, the script reads like a few solid sketches that have been stretched into a full-length production. In fact, it seems like they spent more time working on the logo then they did on piecing together the script. The movie can’t decide if it wants to be making fun of the people who find gross-out teen movies funny, or if it wants to attract those same moviegoers by with appealing directly to them. In the end, it opts toward the proven moneymaking formula of the latter.
The bottom line is that, providing you find gross-out sexual humor funny, Teen Movie will shock you and make you laugh. What else were you expecting?
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