Rating: C+
Dir: Joseph Kahn.
Star: Shanley Caswell, Josh Hutcherson, Parker Bagley, Spencer Locke.
I’m a little surprised I’d never so much as heard of this over the fifteen years since it originally came out. It’s the kind of thing which feels as it it ought to be a cult movie. Only, if it is, the cult must hold their meetings in a phone box [Kids! Ask your parents!] Which I can understand, since this is a wild mess, a mix of ideas that work, ideas that don’t work, and ideas which should have been strangled at birth. Loosely, it’s a parody of high-school slasher movies like Scream. Considering that was itself a self-referential take on horror, we’re already so deep down the meta rabbit-hole, we should expect an invite to a tea-party.
Loosely, we have nerdy Riley (Caswell); her 90s-obsessed best friend Ione (Locke); quirky loner Clapton (Hutcherson); and school bully Billy (Bagley). A masked killer, based on the villain from slasher movie Cinderhella, is offing students, just as the sequel is about to open. Riley seems to be the next target, though nobody believes her. But the students are more worried about the upcoming prom, and who gets to invite who. In an unsubtle nod to John Hughes, everyone ends up in detention on the day of the prom. The solution involves time-travelling back to 1992 (Back to the Future) in a stuffed bear, to rectify an ill-informed body-swap (Freaky Friday), before the world can end. Oh, and Billy is part fly, because… Oh, why the hell not?
Really, unless you are extremely well informed about pop culture from the twenty years preceding this – and not just movies, but fashions and, in particular, music – you will likely be cast adrift. The pace is blistering, Kahn a firm believer in never letting the audience absorb any moment before rushing on to the next one. Sometimes it works: the opening credits are just superb, cropping up in the film as everything from combination locks to cereal. Or Riley trying to hang herself (top), while wearing a hand-crafted “This is what a feminist looks like” shirt. Sometimes, it’s very much guilty of trying far too hard. And when what you are apparently trying far too hard to be, is Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, that’s a problem.
While the scattergun approach is never a hundred percent successful, I think I preferred this when it was mercilessly sticking to parody. Sometimes, it was hard to tell what was being mocked: it took a while before I could figure out the era in which this was operating. Still, having characters download a bootleg work print of Cinderhella 3, to try and work out what was going to happen next, is genius. Especially when the characters in that film do the same, downloading Beauty Beast starring Ron Jeremy and Brooke Haven. When this tries to tell an actual story, it lacks the necessary rigour – especially dragging time-travel into the mix, let alone the shape-shifting aliens which also show up at the end. All too much? Almost certainly.