Movie Review: Not Another Teen Movie (2001)
During the late 90’s and early 00’s the one genre that seemed to be cranking a megaton of movies was the “Teen” movie. If you were selling a script that involved high school or college students getting into some sort of drama, major studios were more than willing to greenlight it during that era. And with the saturation of teen movies in that time period, what better way to celebrate than putting out a parody that parodies a HUGE range of those movies and call it Not Another Teen Movie.
In NATM, a pre-Captain America Chris Evans plays Jake, a stereotypical second-string quarterback who is dumped by his cheerleader girlfriend Pricilla (Jaime Pressly). This leads to Jake making a bet with the starting quarterback Austin (Eric Christian Olsen) that he could make the school’s artistic rebel Janey into a prom queen, spoofing the premise of She’s All That. And that leads Jake to asking his sister (Mia Kirshner) to make Jamie over… in exchange for a moment of incest should she be successful, a version of the plot in Cruel Intentions. Also, because the writers need an excuse to parody American Pie, Janie’s brother Mitch (Cody McMains) and his two friends try desperately to lose their virginity. If my summary of this movie sounds like a mess, it’s because the movie itself is a mess and an unfunny mess at that.
This film introduces way too many characters and a large portion of them are as useless to the thin story as they are unfunny. For example, the character Areola graces some of the posters for NATM as if she a key character but in reality contributes nothing to the movie besides wearing nothing. There are cameo appearances from stars who appear in much better films such as Molly Ringwald and Mr. T, but those cameos are nowhere near enough to save this film.
The few characters I was able to appreciate were the token black guy Malik (Deon Richmond), the foul-mouthed football coach (Ed Lauter), and Reggie Ray, played by Ron Lester, who also played Reggie’s source character Billy Bob from Varsity Blues. That. Is. It.
As for the funny moments of NATM, I found myself barely laughing at any of the humor. The writers were clearly more concerned with squeezing as many jokes tied to as many teen movies as possible. And a lot of those jokes are pretty much rewritten versions of the original jokes in the original movies, such as the “We will get laid” speech stripped from American Pie. And the biggest insult to intelligence is the three consecutive slow-motion entrances that happened before the movie reaches ten minutes.
Not Another Teen Movie tries to take the Scary Movie approach and fails miserably. If you want to see a legitimately funny teen comedy, you are better off watching a real teen movie.