NOT ANOTHER TEEN MOVIE
Released: December 14, 2001
While not even really up to the standards of the film's being parodied or even the similar parody type film like "Scary Movie", there are still a few laughs here and there to make this a worthwhile trip to your video store if you have low expectations. Made up of a principle cast of mostly lesser-knowns, "Not Another Teen Movie" uses "She's All That" as its template but borrows, er, parodies virtually every teen oriented movie ever made - going back as far as Tom Cruise in "Risky Business" (1983). The jokes do come but at the expense of the audience's intelligence and the actor's dignity. Movies like "American Pie" seem like thought provoking satire compared to "Not Another Teen Movie". Join Janey Briggs (Chyler Leigh), an aspiring artist who is outcast by her classmates for wearing glasses, a ponytail and paint-covered overalls; and Jake Wyler (Chris Evans), the all-American football star who makes a foolish bet to turn Janey into a prom queen. Leigh - who shares part of a name with Rachel Leigh Cook from "She's All That" - plays the part Leigh Cook brought to life in that movie... But as usual, Hollywood wants us to believe girls like Leigh and Leigh Cook are ugly, ordinary geeks - which they are quite obviously not as we see from the very first scenes in both movies. Also appearing here are Randy Quaid, Mia Kirshner and an unbilled Molly Ringwald whose thankless role wraps up this inexplicable exercise in playing with the formula director Keenen Ivory Wayans perfected with his pair of "Scary Movie" pardodies. Ringwald should have resisted the urge to take the role and simply let her bonafide classics like "Pretty In Pink" and "The Breakfast Club" stand on their own. Hopefully her recent batch of C-grade softcore flicks won't stop her from at least one more decent role before her window on Hollywood totally shuts.
82 Minutes
Columbia/Sony