A large crew of teen heartthrobs star in this genre-straddling flick. [PG-13]
By: Kam Williams
I knew I was in trouble when the ticket taker told me, "I feel sorry for you," as he handed me my stub.
I doubt that The In Crowd will bulls-eye even its targeted teen audience, despite all the tight clothes and unnecessary nudity. Part teen romance, part whodunit, the movie spends too much time straddling an unlikely line between coming-of-age flick and psychological, sci-fi thriller.
Unfortunately, director Mary Lambert (Pet Sematary I & II) does little more than set a tone of ethereal erotomania. The plot of The In Crowd has so little continuity that I couldn’t explain the storyline even if I wanted to. That’s funny, because Warner Brothers, on the front page of the press kit, specifically asks critics not to divulge the film’s twists and turns. But the movie keeps the audience more in suspense about its genre than about any on-screen eventualities.
My minute mystery version of The In Crowd reads as follows: A young co-ed is sprung from an insane asylum by her shrink, who secretly houses her at a posh country club as a live-in waitress. There, the blonde is befriended by a clique of spoiled-rotten brats, home on summer vacation from college. They know nothing of her stint in the loony bin, but the girl’s recovery is compromised when she gets blackmailed by a jealous Jezebel for turning her man’s head.
The "crowded" cast is chock-full of emerging, vaguely familiar teenybop idols such as Ford fashion model-turned-actress Susan Ward (TV’s Sunset Beach), Lori Heuring (The Newton Boys), Nathan Bexton (Go), Ethan Erickson (Percy on TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Laurie Fortier (recurring role on TV’s Boy Meets World), Matthew Settle (I Still Know What You Did Last Summer), Kim Murphy (regular on TV’s Party of Five) and Katharine Towne (Harrison Ford and Michelle Pfeiffer’s daughter in What Lies Beneath). Daniel Hugh Kelly (McCormack of the long since cancelled TV’s Hardcastle and McCormack) is the only elder in the principal cast.
At the opening credits, a perfectly normal-looking Adrien (Ms. Heuring) sits caged in a mental hospital with a deranged, unkempt roommate who looks like she wandered in off the set of Survivor. In the first of innumerable red-herrings, the lunatic shreds a postcard Adrien has just received of Andrew Wyeth’s well-known painting "Christina’s World."
Just in the nick of time, the dashing Dr. Thompson (Mr. Kelly) intervenes, whisking the attractive Adrien away to his office, where he pitches a plan to get her far from this maddening crowd. Pledged to secrecy, Adrien agrees and is instantly deposited in her new digs at a luxurious country club.
I’m not a shrink, but I’d guess that it’s wrong to ask a patient for a promise of confidentiality. If anything, I think it’s supposed to be the other way around. But we soon learn that this Dr. Feelgood is not above mixing psychoanalysis and pleasure when he has a fling with a hot, little head-case named Brittany (Ms. Ward). Now, I’m sure that’s wrong. Adrien, meanwhile, seems to spend more time dating than waiting on tables.
The plot thins when she inadvertently stumbles on evidence of murder among her new social set. But as resident kook and a nouveau newcomer, Adrien’s alarm falls on deaf ears, except for those of a killer willing to beat the living daylights out of anyone who gets close to a clue.
Rated PG-13 despite brief nudity, sexual situations, drug use, mild profanity and gratuitous violence.
For an alphabetical listing of movie reviews from the past six months, click here.