The beginning of this movie shines as a most daring over-the-top send-up of the high school flick genre. The daring reaches its zany peak with the collapsing potty parody. Then it's rather downhill from there. Perhaps that's in part because what's being spoofed is already so preposterous that the spoof can't melodramatize it much farther. Still, I believe it could have done better. The ending was lame and uninspired. If one wanted to make a case that Molly Ringwald is washed up as an actress, one could find lots of support for that in her cliched ranting in her cameo toward the end.

This cinematic disaster zone may well be the product of the overzealous trashing instinct of movie critics. When Sophia Coppola played in THE GODFATHER PART III, critics just couldn't say enough to utterly dub her the dud of an otherwise outstanding cast. Actually I never saw her as particularly out of her league among that cast; she seemed to hold her own in an ensemble quite adequate if not necessarily outstanding. If only she could have gone on acting, we all might be better off today, whether her acting ended up Oscar quality or strictly B-movie. But possibly the critics' trashing pushed her career in other directions, and she ended up doing something truly awful -- she wrote the screenplay for this atrocity, the VIRGIN SUICIDES. It has a story unbelievable and ultimately unexplained. It is thus gratuitously and senselessly downbeat for a story really serving no purpose. It wastes acting talent without creating any really interesting characters. The five sisters in it esentially live just to die senselessly and meaninglessly. The audience can find their deaths sad but otherwise has no reason feel they met characters of any interest. And so here we have ground zero of the career of budding angel Kirsten Dunst. Before this she was the bright shining cameo in WAG THE DOG, was superb in DROP DEAD GORGEOUS, and didn't exactly languish in dullness in DICK. But since this present train wreck of a movie, she doesn't seem to rise above the lame megafluff level of BRING IT ON, GET OVER IT, and CRAZY/BEAUTIFUL. We might have had the chance to see both her and Sophia Coppola as actresses not to be sneezed at. As is, no use "waiting with bated breath" for one out of two.