Chastity Bites

I am aghast at how many ways this movie not only fails to do the right thing, but how profound and complete those failures are, and how this movie easily could’ve been good. The premise seems like it would be okay: Countless Elizabeth Bathory uses virgin blood to stay immortal, and has set herself up as an abstinence counselor for a high school in a conservative town to groom victims. Only one girl, a smart, fiery young feminist, sees through her and risks life and limb to stop her. There’s a few ways this could be good. Obviously, a straight up slasher that plays with the tropes of “sex=death” by reversing it (Cherry Falls tried this and failed). It could go full-on horror comedy satire, taking aim at both sides. It could dial up the ridiculousness of the premise and go for camp. Does it choose any of those lanes? No, it does not. It sits in the middle, refusing to commit to anything. A team of excavators and the Webb Telescope couldn’t locate a joke in this movie. It tried to do things that are clever, but never actually funny, so the comedy side of the movie is just absent. It never takes the horror seriously either. I’ve felt more tension in a Bill & Ted movie. And the aforementioned attempts at cleverness are just that — attempts, because this movie is nowhere near as smart as it thinks it is. The heroine is the embodiment of every caricature Fox News has of a liberal, and the villain is the reverse, an amalgamation of every stereotype MSNBC has of a conservative. It’s bad enough that the leads are basically humanized New Yorker cartoons, but the supporting characters are worse, as they’re crudely drawn stick figures. There’s a group of popular girls; guess what their singular personality trait is. The love internet for the lead is a love-sick puppy dog. The best friend is a best friend. Is there a third act argument between the friends? Sure is! So, we have characters that are either too simple to be human, or human Tweet compilations. The direction is dull and lifeless. The plotting is languid and infuriating (before kicking off the invasion of the villains lair, the heroine says to the boyfriend “we don’t split up unless absolutely necessary”, and then they split up 30 seconds later for something that isn’t necessary). The score is mindless and disappears into the background as soon as the note leaves your ears. The acting ranges from “this person was present on the set and in front of a camera” to “I know you’re a US citizen, but I’m still going to find a way to have you deported”. You can’t even get entertainment value from the kills, because the villain is killing virgin girls to collect their blood, so everything HAS to be a throat slit. But the final nail is the wretched, obnoxious, ham-handed dialogue that batters you like a baseball bat. The heroine speaks in lines from HuffPo and Jezebel. She’s Julia Stiles’ character from 10 Things I Hate About You, but with the volume turned up to 11, and the subtlety knob turned down to zero. It’s like the movie is afraid you won’t believe she’s a feminist, so it has to remind you every 90 seconds with smug condescension and hoary platitudes. The rhetoric of the parents and the villain is similarly cartoonish, so much so that the purity group the villain starts is called the Virgin Action Group. Get it? The initials are VAG. Like vagina. That’s less subtle than a house fire, and yet NOBODY COMMENTS ABOUT THIS IN THE MOVIE EVEN ONCE. What the fuck, movie. What the fuck. There’s no complexity given to the parents’ drive to keep their daughters virgins. It’s like the Underwear Gnomes’ plot in South Park, except here, it’s Step 1) keep daughters virgins. Step 2) ??? Step 3) ??? And the movie makes one more fatal error by making the bitch squad a constant presence and a crucial plot point, so their one-dimensional bullying and terrible behavior is omnipresent. Google Glass. Heil Honey I’m Home. New Coke. The Arch Deluxe. The Ford Edsel. Ideas someone should’ve looked at in the design phase and said “but wait …”, because they were too wrong for this Earth. You can add to that list this movie.