Poison Ivy: The Secret Society

This movie had some potential in the script, and the actors had moments where they shined through, but for the most part this movie was a muddled mess.

The plot to this film seems like it was originally intended for teenage girls. If that had been the case, and the nudity and rather boring sex scenes had been excised I could understand a market for this type of film. Maybe if the plot had been sexed up a little, with more emphasis on the sexual politics and seduction I could understand it being a late night movie, but in the end the movie is a mess. It seems like soft core porn for middle school girls who enjoy staring at fake breasts.

The movie is rather dull, the story doesn't really kick in till the final five minutes, the direction is flat, and most of the actors seem like they are about to break out laughing during the scenes. The Poison Ivy series was never stellar film making, but at least the films knew their audience. This one is a confused, muddled mess that never decides if it wants to be a slightly dirty version of Mean Girls or a late night cable flick.

Skip it.

Didn't feel like I was watching a Poison Ivy film. There are seductive touches here, and there. But there's no linking connection to the original Ivy character which the other sequels worked in. Here the story beats were putting me more the mindset of 'Cruel Intentions' meets 'The Skulls'. Still I was surprisingly entertained by this made-for-cable junk, if mainly for the viper performance of Shawna Waldron.

Over the last week I watched the final two entries of the series (The New Seduction & The Secret Society) expecting little to nothing, but I actually came away liking them more then the better regarded first two films.

The last (to date, anyway, and I'm reviewing this in June 2023) Poison Ivy film.

And that's probably just as well. This was the worst of the lot, by a comfortable margin. Poor acting, a flimsy script, plenty of slow-motion sex scenes - screaming out low budget, direct-to-TV, which this was, premiering, according to the IMDB page, on Lifetime - and, really, very little really to write home about.

I didn't mind previous instalments in this series but it should have ended with 'The New Seduction'. I guess the old adage about flogging a dead horse is an apt one here. As far as Poison Ivy goes: there's not much left to be flogged, at this point.

Sorry but this LMN waste is nothing but a porno movie and a bad one at that. At least in pornos you get to see more nudity and carrying on. In this we are subjected to these bunch of bimbos, overly made up and lip gloss up to here, go through the antics of being part of a sorority house that is bent in doing evil and murder. The lead gal, a hick from the sticks, is played with a vacant expression throughout the film. The evil one, in a push up bra and tons of eye makeup goes around flirting with all the male losers. In one movie, I'd love to see a character like this get so far in flirting and then be told the guy was gay and she was wasting her time. Just once. So we are forced to sit for two hours just to see them get their uppence. And it is never as exciting as all the bad deeds they do throughout the picture. Those so called sorority girls are all a bit long in the tooth to be playing young coeds. The guys look younger then they do. I wonder what the director was thinking of when he cast this. Boobs, I guess. Certainly not acting.

Onetime child stars Miriam McDonald and Shawna Waldron go the Alyssa Milano route, trying to prove how grown-up they are by taking their clothes off in a terrible Poison Ivy movie. All the Poison Ivy movies are awful but this one, which doesn't actually have anything to do with any of the others, makes Milano's look like Gone with the Wind by comparison. The story is impossibly dumb. The acting is uniformly pathetic. McDonald and Waldron may look good but their acting skills have not grown with their bodies. McDonald is bad. Waldron is way beyond bad, turning in one of the most atrocious performances ever seen. The supporting players are all pretty much terrible as well. Ryan Kennedy, who plays the guy involved with the two key girls, is particularly lousy. To be fair none of the performers are helped by a script which is mind-boggling in its stupidity. McDonald plays Daisy, an innocent country bumpkin who goes away to college. She gets mixed up with the school's powerful all-female secret society, the Ivies. This group hasn't got the "secret" part of secret society down as they live in a big house right in the middle of campus and everybody knows all about them. Anyhow, Waldron plays Azalea, the key figure in this cabal of stupid girls. Azalea wants some internship, she's afraid Daisy might get it. So Azalea hatches schemes to take Daisy down and claim that precious internship for herself. The story has huge holes in it. It is neither believable nor interesting. The movie slogs along towards the finish, interrupted by occasional skin displays from its two leads because honestly getting them naked is the only reason this movie even exists. The ending somehow manages to be even dumber than everything which preceded it with quite possibly the worst fight sequence in movie history. This is a movie which fails in every possible way. If McDonald and Waldron were hoping for a career boost from this, well ladies I've seen Alyssa Milano and you're no Alyssa Milano.