Lawrence.com

The most important rule for a good parody is to stay close to the source material. The more accurately you portray your targets, the more likely you are to hit on all the things that made them worthy of ridicule in the first place. Teen movies are especially easy to make fun of, full of people and situations that would never exist in the real world, but still presented as if they crystallize true adolescence.

The makers of "Not Another Teen Movie" don't work very hard to skewer their cinematic victims. Fortunately, all they really have to do is copy scenes from every youth-oriented film of the past 20 years, then make them even sillier. It's like shooting fish in a shot glass.

Set at John Hughes High School (where students eat in the Anthony Michael Dining Hall), this film takes its main plot from "She's All That," in which the Popular Jock (Chris Evans this time, doing his best Freddie Prinze Jr. impression) accepts a bet to turn the Pretty Ugly Girl (Rachael Leigh Cook lookalike Chyler Leigh) into the Prom Queen. He also has to contend with his ex-girlfriend, the Nasty Cheerleader (Jaime Pressly), and his buddies, the Cocky Blonde Guy (Eric Christian Olsen), the Stupid Fat Guy (Ron Lester) and the Token Black Guy (Deon Richmond). The characters do have names, by the way, but as with most teen films, it's easier to identify them by their official stereotypes.

"Not Another Teen Movie" consists primarily of random jokes, a few of which are actually connected to the main story. The gags that work are the ones that will elicit knowing laughs from viewers who grew up on Hughes' oeuvre and/or have seen its more recent offspring. There are references to everything from "Grease" to "The Breakfast Club" to "American Pie," including a few choice cameos from veterans of the genre. Some of this is dead-on, too, like the sexy foreign exchange student (Cerina Vincent) who walks around naked (that's always her purpose, after all), or the way everyone in the school suddenly turns into a professional dancer on Prom Night.

Of course, in this post-Farrelly brothers world, simply riffing on popular culture isn't enough. You also have to gross out your audience as often as possible, which director Joel Gallen and his five (yes, five) screenwriters are more than happy to do. Sticky saliva and exploding excrement make an appearance, alongside the now-obligatory molestation of pastry. The bit with a football player getting torn in half has a kind of "South Park" audacity to it, but the rest is disgusting enough to be virtually unwatchable. The only conceivable reason anyone would want to witness this sort of thing is as an endurance test, to see how much they could take before throwing up in their popcorn. That's entertainment.

Gallen and Company also have a habit of referring directly to the movies they're satirizing, as if the audience needs to be reminded that this scene is a take-off on "Pretty in Pink" or that scene is a variation on "Never Been Kissed." There's something vaguely pathetic about this, as if the filmmakers were desperate to ensure that nobody ever felt left out of the joke. Which would be impossible, since everything in the movie is so screamingly obvious.

The cast is pretty low-rent, but they give it a good try. Leigh, in particular, has a gift for subtle facial expressions, while supporting actors like Mia Kirshner (as Evans' evil sister, a la "Cruel Intentions") and Joanna Garcia (as a cheerleader with Tourette's Syndrome) at least have fun with their over-the-top characters.

Some of this enthusiasm filters down to the audience, leading to a few outright laughs and a handful of decent chuckles. By the time it finally exhausts itself, however, "Not Another Teen Movie" will probably invoke another stereotype: The Moviegoers Who Wish They'd Bought Tickets to Something Else.