The days of Airplane and Naked Gun are over. Nowadays, we have the Scary Movies, Spy Hard, Date Movie, Not Another Teen Movie, etc....of all of these, Teen Movie is quite easily the best one. The point of spoofs and satires, to me, are not just to take familiar scenes and do something retarded and gross with them, but instead to actually make fun of all the things in the original movies that, while watching them, we all turned to our friends and said "wait a minute, thats kind of stupid". Teen Movie does this extremely well. How many of us lucky movie fans who saw She's All That had trouble seeing why everyone in the movie thought the lead actress was ugly just because she had glasses and a ponytail? She was still a babe! How many of these teen movies give the main lead actress a friend who is clearly into her, but she always seems to ignore any possibility of romance between them, instead pursuing another character and asking for her friend's help/advice? How many people thought the characters in Cruel Intentions were just sexually over the top to the point of being absurd? Teen Movie pokes great fun at all of these flaws. It is, unlike many other movies that attempt to be like it, a true satire, taking characters and not just doing stupid things with them, but exaggerating the traits of their serious counterparts and, when it comes down to it, just making fun of them. It has surprisingly good plot cohesion while still making fun of a variety of teen movies. I suppose the best way to distinguish this movie from all other modern spoofs is that this one is truly intelligent. Sure it has some stupid jokes, and toilet humor (that I admit I chuckled at in disgust like the diarrhea scene and the lesbian kiss with the old woman), but it also has some very clever jokes, like when is it appropriate to start a slow clap, why do these teen movies seem to only have one black character, and how silly is it that things slow down for emphasis when the beautiful female lead enters the room. Please, give this one a chance. If you've seen the other modern spoofs, I'm confident you will appreciate the noticeable and subtle differences between them and Teen Movie that make the latter much more enjoyable and palatable to watch.
