This is an absolutely insane wild ride of a high school comedy that went far further than I expected. The thing is, it’s a totally formulaic and predictable story about two buddies who want to get laid and so do something outrageous to become popular. The twist is that the two buddies here are lesbian girls and indeed the entire film is framed through a sort of gay-tinted lenses perspective. I’m not certain I really liked it that much but it’s creative and it left me with so many questions like do high schoolers in the US talk like that these days and are attitudes like this mainstream?

The two losers at the bottom of the school’s social hierarchy here are best friends PJ and Josie. Both are lesbian virgin who despair of ever getting to have sex before they graduate high school. Yet they don’t want just anybody. They respectively want Brittany and Isabel, two of the most attractive cheerleaders. When they show up at the local fair one night, they run into another unpopular girl Hazel and mislead her that they were both sent into juvenile detention that summer. Later they flirt lamely with their respectively crushes. As they are leaving they see Isabel arguing with her boyfriend Jeff, the school’s star quarterback. Josie offers Isabel a ride and when Jeff gets in the way, lets the car lightly bump into him. They talk their way out of trouble by convincing the principal that they are into self-defense and start a fight club to empower women. The duo actually only want to lure attractive girls and get together with them and Hazel is roped in to do all the actual organizational work. They even manage to get Mr. G, their teacher, to be the club advisor though he is mostly preoccupied by the divorce he is going through.

It’s a deliberate throwback to the juvenile high school comedies of yore about nerds trying to sleep with girls. Except that the characters are girls themselves and the entire world they inhabit is given a gay twist. As such Jeff girlishly screams and flops to the ground after being bumped by the car and nearly everyone has a gay vibe. The story gets increasingly unhinged as the school’s rivalry with another school devolves into murderous violence and it’s all par for the course. I did find myself laughing out loud at times even if it’s not a terribly highbrow brand of comedy but the sheer outrageousness of the concept is impressive. The film never misses a chance to poke fun at all kinds of character archetypes and tropes, so Mr. G admits that he is only being a token feminist, Jeff is revealed to be actually into MILFs and so on. It all seems terribly offensive to me but of course that’s the point as the old films that served as its inspiration are horribly inappropriate by today’s standards and turnabout is fair play.

It’s so far off from what I know of American society that I immediately wondered if the way the characters speak and the kind of jokes they make are at all representative what high schoolers there are now. Reading up on the subject, it seems not because the filmmakers had a lot of difficulty finding a studio to back their project and even more trouble finding a high school that would let them shoot. So this seems more like a deliberately provocative exaggeration of trends that might exist but are in no way mainstream. I’d rate this as a wickedly fun satire that is premised on subverting an outdated genre of film. Some of the jokes fly right by me and at times, it feels too mean. And then of course this genre has been left by the wayside for good reason. Every story beat is perfectly predictable. It’s just that everything is inverted.

I don’t really like this film but I do like that something like it exists. This is only director Emma Seligman’s second film but already it’s clear that this is the type of film that she wants to make. I don’t think this style of work is right for me and indeed you might have to American to not be left bewildered by the complex and ever changing sexual and relationship landscape her work dives into. It is fascinating to me how quickly what counts as normal is diverging in parts of the US but I’d need a guide who’s closer to my age group, I suspect.