Dir. Jonathan Levine (2006)
All the boys want to love Mandy Lane. And by love, I mean have sex with. Unfortunately, their bids to win her affection are interrupted by someone who wants to kill them.
CAUTION: MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS
So I gotta be completely honest: I really didn’t like this movie. Like, at all. This whole movie is literally “look how hot Amber Heard is.” Don’t get me wrong, she is kinda a hottie when she’s not shitting in your bed, but she’s not that hot. Not to the point where every guy in the school is going to ignore the other hot girls who are desperate to have sex with them to get with her. To think that they’re going to invite all of their friends to the cabin to try to seduce Mandy, including the girls who want to have sex with them, is a bit of a stretch. But, c’est la vie, that’s what the movie is about, so I guess we must progress from there.
Not pictured: Helen of fucking Troy.
It’s difficult to really break down the plot of this film. Yeah, there’s an “inciting incident” that kicks things off, in this case a dude who drunkenly jumps from a roof into a pool after another kid encourages him to do so, dying in the process and leaving the other kid a social pariah. But after that, it basically is all about how every guy wants to bang Mandy/Amber. They each take turns having sex or talking about having sex with the other girls in their social circle, but it all comes back to which one of them is going to get to have sex with Mandy. The other girls? Yeah, they don’t even really seem to mind this, which is… not my experience with high school girls, or women in general, in the slightest. I think you would be hard pressed to find a girl who would just be like, totally ok with the fact that you want to bang another girl. But, I digress once again, tis the point of the film.
At the end of the day, the only things that matter in a slasher film are gnarly deaths and a watchable plot. Mandy gives us a couple of cool death scenes, but the plot is trash, and the dialogue is absolutely horrendous. Not to mention these teenagers are dirty as all hell, making sex joke after sex joke, none of which are funny, between doing every drug they can randomly get their hands on in this farmhouse that is the setting for their attempted deflowering of Mandy/Amber. Shit was not like this when I was a teenager, and for the first time when watching a “high school movie,” I’m actually kinda glad. These people are terrible people, and what’s worse, the characters are inexcusably one-dimensional.
Boring characters and bad actors.
There’s almost no mystery to the film, as the killer is revealed relatively quickly, with a twist thrown in at the end to gratify stupid audience members who were convinced they were having a good time. There are even fewer layers to the film, because it’s shallow as fuck. It’s relatively boring, the dialogue is dreadful, and Amber Heard is not hot enough for this. Johnny Depp did not die for this shit.
Who this movie is for: Teen slasher fans who have seen all the rest; People who enjoy bad movies; Amber Heard (because you know she’s a fucking narcissist)
Bottom line: This movie sucks, and is absolutely not worth your time. I think I’m going to miss out on reviewing Teaching Mrs. Tingle, which was planned for this week, because I watched this shit instead. Don’t waste your time like I wasted mine. If you want to watch a decent Amber Heard joint, check out The Stepfather remake and avoid this one at all costs. Watch the last five minutes if you want to see Heard’s character being somewhat interesting, but other than that you can skip it.
