The Random Rerun of the Day is the Deranged 1989 Cult Classic Teen Witch
There are many places to read about pop culture online, but if you want to read about the episode of Donahue where Peter Criss angrily confronted his drunk impersonator or the 1985 “The Smurfs are homosexual Satanists” expose, “Deception of a Generation,” I’m the only game in town.
On my site at least, a loving appreciation of the exquisitely insane 1989 supernatural teen sex comedy Teen Witch promises to generate twice as much traffic as a Scalding Hot Takes on Captain Marvel, a motion picture about a woman who attains magical powers she bewilderingly does not use to trick a hunky football player into wanting to go on a kissing date with her. Some might call that progress. I call that political correctness.
Teen Witch opens with liberal use of something I like to call the “Fuck Sax.” If you’re hearing a good, long, orgasmic blast of that smooth-yet-sultry Fuck Sax, someone is trying to get fucked, someone is fucking, or someone is reflecting dreamily on fucking they did in the past.
In this case, the steamy romantic thinking about fucking is Louise (Robin Lively), a dowdy fifteen year old erotically obsessed with Brad (Daniel Lester Gauthier), a big old slab of beefcake with all the accoutrements of the archetype, including big college plans (Stanford like his old man!), a blonde sex bomb cheerleader girlfriend who is the envy of all her classmates, a need for tutoring that puts him in Louise’s orbit and the requisite football stardom.
Louise feels self-conscious around her classmates for a very good reason: she’s a plain teenager while they all appear to be Playmates in their early thirties, most notably Lisa Fuller as Brad’s super-popular cheerleader girlfriend Randa. Fuller was thirty-three when she played Louise’s rival for Brad’s affections.
Louise spends most of her life lusting after Brad, but she’s not alone in being overwhelmed by hormones and lust. Everyone here is horny. The movie can barely contain its horniness. It is perpetually breaking out into extravagant displays of lust.
For example, Louise is in the locker room one otherwise uneventful afternoon when a cheerleader bursts in and shouts, “Hey cheerleaders! I’ve got the new cheer! It’s so fab!” A peppy production number set to an infectious surf-guitar-laced wad of bubble gum New Wave called “I Like Boys” follows that could not reasonably be deemed a high school cheer, or a cheer of any sort.
With “I Like Boys”, the boy-crazed cheerleaders are rooting less for a team and more for a gender, that gender, of course, being male. The lyrics to “I Like Boys” are disappointingly not subtitled on Amazon Prime, perhaps because they chronicle a young girl trading in the girlish delights of childhood for more adult pastimes, as evidenced by lyrics about “making no more mud pies” in favor of making sweet, sweet love.
Teen Witch is a musical unlike any other, in the sense that I’m not sure it qualifies as a musical, and also I’m not sure whether the filmmakers know what musicals are. Teen Witch’s cult consequently comes mainly from its status as a surprise rap semi-musical featuring mercifully brief rap interludes featuring the three whitest men in existence this side of Mike Pence and Mike Huckabee.
The only person lame enough to be impressed by the Blindingly White Trio’s sub- “Super Bowl Shuffle” rhymes is Louise’s bootleg Blossom outcast best friend, who says admiringly of one of the doofuses, “Look at how funky he is!”
Louise uses her dark powers to give her friend sub-par rhyming skills of her own in a scene that equally catapulted itself into the annals of camp cinema as the most gloriously pathetic rap battle/battle of the sexes committed to film.
People show up on Louise’s front lawn to profess their feverish fandom for her. Louise, honestly, seems pretty cool with it. She was a brain for the first two years of high school. Shouldn’t she be rewarded for her suffering by being worshiped by the very mortals who once foolishly shunned her?
Louise wants to take Brad to the bone zone. Since their high school now serves as a worshipful cult, Louise has the social capital to make that happen but she wants Brad to want her for her boring, vindictive, plain “true self” and not because she can make a teacher she hates played by Shelly Berman take off all his clothes in a moment of acute psycho-sexual humiliation.
Louise tells Brad that there’s so much more to him than just football. There is not. There is nothing to Brad but his looks, yet we’re supposed to be invested in him and his success nonetheless.
Teen Witch began life as an official female variation on Teen Wolf, the schlocky Canadian supernatural sports horror comedy that became a bona fide pop culture sensation due to some wonderfully sticky elements and the great Michael J. Fox at the apex of his charm and adorability.
Somewhere along the way, the movie lost its official connection to Teen Wolf, yet it became a cult classic all the same, by virtue of being at once hopelessly rooted in shameless teen-sex comedy clichés and genuinely unlike any other movie ever made, including Teen Wolf and Teen Wolf Too.
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