Review: My Super Psycho Sweet 16 (2009)

My Super Psycho Sweet 16 (2009)

Rated TV-14

Score: 3 out of 5

The 2000s were an extremely tacky and trashy time that, having been imbued with more money than sense, mistakenly thought it was classy, and few artifacts of its pop culture demonstrate that fact better than MTV's hit reality shows from that decade. The Laguna Beach franchise, Pimp My Ride, and Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica all elevated conspicuous consumption and the worship of extreme wealth as virtues, while legacy reality shows like The Real World and Road Rules, which once pretended to be social experiments, followed the trajectory of so much of the genre in focusing on the most over-the-top personalities clashing with each other. Jersey Shore, the last hurrah of that style of reality show, came along late in the decade and capped the whole trend off in a spectacular haze of hair gel and liquor. Any pretensions that MTV still had of being a music network were reduced to featuring music on these shows. But above all the rest, My Super Sweet Sixteen, a show about uber-rich and spoiled teenagers holding lavish Sweet 16 parties, held a special place as the show that even many people who ate those shows up wouldn't defend. Clips from it were reportedly featured in North Korean propaganda films about Western decadence, and Western critics weren't any kinder to it. A quick YouTube search for the brattiest teens or biggest meltdowns from that show will produce a treasure trove of cringe content that few can match. MTV not only knew it, they marketed the show as less aspirational and more as a source of hate figures for teenagers to gawk at. Jennifer Lawrence first earned her SAG card filming a pair of ads for the show in which she plays a 16-year-old girl getting humiliated at her party. In 2008, they created a spinoff called Exiled in which kids who'd been featured on the show get sent off to remote countries to live in harsh conditions, finally giving the little twerps what they had coming.

And in 2009, at the height of the Great Recession consigning that awful moment in pop culture to the dustbin of history where few people aside from kitsch connoisseurs like to talk about it, MTV created this, a straight-up slasher movie in which one of those lavish, decadent Sweet 16 parties gets targeted by a psycho killer, with the spoiled brat hosting the party at the top of the killer's shit list. And as somebody who remembers that show, and that period of time in general, all too well, this movie was a blast when I first saw it, a welcome parody that couldn't have landed at a better time and turned out to be enough of a hit to spawn a trilogy. Watching it again years later on my birthday, the in-the-moment desire to watch caricatures of My Super Sweet Sixteen's worst "stars" meet the end of a knife has been replaced by a fuzzy nostalgia of sorts -- and a measure of surprise that this actually kind of holds up as a real-deal slasher movie, one with an excellent sense of humor and a lead performance by Julianna Guill as the birthday girl that elevates the slow first half and fairly flat direction. No joke, My Super Psycho Sweet 16 is a legitimately good time and the movie that the Prom Night remake wanted to be: a flashy, glossy, throwback teen party hack-and-slash that delighted in lining up the worst examples of the millennial generation to put through hell.

The backstory is that ten years ago, Skye Rotter's father Charlie, an entertainer at the Roller Dome, turned out to be a serial killer who murdered six teenagers for messing with his rink. He was busted when Skye caught him in the act one night, later dying (or did he?) when the prison bus crashed, while Skye went off to live with her aunt. Now, Skye's rich, obnoxious 15-year-old classmate Madison Penrose wants to reopen the Roller Dome for her Sweet 16, and she's not the kind of girl who takes "no" for an answer; her parents are pushovers, and she is very pushy. Skye and her dweebish childhood friend Derek pointedly weren't invited, so they decide to crash the party, especially given that the popular jock Brigg a) has shown an interest in Skye, and b) has been invited to the party by his jealous ex-girlfriend Madison. Also showing up uninvited is Charlie, who, in true slasher form, has put on his old "Lord of the Rink" knight uniform from his days working at the Roller Dome to start getting medieval on bratty teenagers.

This film makes no bones as to its main selling point: watching kids who would have been perfect fits for My Super Sweet Sixteen get sliced and diced. And nowhere is this more obvious than with Madison Penrose. While Skye is the ostensible protagonist, it's Madison who's the real star, a narcissistic high school queen bee in the mold of Regina George who is obsessed with being the center of attention and more than willing to scheme against anybody who challenges her status atop the popularity food chain. Julianna Guill was having the time of her life playing this airhead, always popping off the screen and making me want to reach through it and start wringing her neck for the best reasons. Numerous infamous moments from My Super Sweet Sixteen are homaged and parodied with her antics, as she freaks out over getting the wrong expensive cake delivered to her party while the party planners worry about whether she'll do the same over the fact that they got her the wrong luxury sports car for her birthday. All this turns out to be setup for the punchline in the third act, where the other shoe drops and Charlie, after stalking around and killing teenagers backstage for most of the movie, proceeds to send Madison's precious party to hell. Guill was far and away the MVP in the cast, running away with the film from the moment she first appeared on screen while managing to give Madison some layers towards the end once she's fully realized that shit just got real -- layers that ultimately reveal an even bigger asshole underneath, but still somebody who's a bit more than a one-dimensional brat. With a lesser actor in the role, the first half of the film could've easily turned into a parade of teen drama cliches, but Guill was just having so much fun that it rubbed off on everything around her.

I wish I could say the same about the rest of the cast, though. While I liked Skye as a final girl, that came down more to the writing and her fairly unique emo look, especially the twist at the end involving her character, as Lauren McKnight's performance, while not bad, was still thoroughly outshined by Guill. Chris Zylka did what he needed to do in making Brigg a likable male lead who's being manipulated by Madison, but he didn't really rise above the writing, either. Derek, through no fault of his actor Matt Angel, also came across as a bit of a sleaze in how he pursues his romantic affection for Skye; while it never crosses the line from uncomfortable into outright creepy, I don't think that the film meant to portray him as being so horny the way it ultimately did, especially with his introduction being him telling Skye that she should have sex with him if neither of them get laid by the end of the school year. The teen drama storylines in general, especially those that don't concern the Sweet 16 party, felt like padding to get the film up to a feature-length runtime, less like organic character development and more like excuses to get everyone to the party. Madison, Skye, and Brigg were the only characters who didn't feel like obvious cannon fodder for Charlie to hack his way through, the rest -- Madison's friends Chloe, Olivia, and Lilly, Brigg's asshole jock friend Kevin, the party planner who tries to get into Madison's pants -- all being fairly one-note stereotypes. Lilly in particular had potential as a reluctant friend of Madison's who sympathizes with Skye over their shared distaste for her best friend's bad behavior, but she accomplishes little over the course of the film except to get drunk. As a side note, the casual homophobia and gay jokes from Skye in an early scene were also very of-their-time, and a bit off-putting. While this film may have been affectionately homaging old-school '80s slashers, there are some things that are best left in that era.

The other elements of this film's '80s slasher throwback, however, are all surprisingly well-done. While this film has a TV-14 rating, it gets away with quite a bit of gore, including a slit throat, a spear through the back of the head and out the mouth, a guy being discovered with his chest cavity torn open, and my personal highlight, somebody being decapitated on roller skates and their headless body rolling out onto the dance floor in a scene that homaged both Carrie and the original Prom Night in equal measure. While some kills were kept mostly off-camera (and even then, the two big ones there felt appropriately brutal due to the sound effects and some creative cuts), this did not feel like a film that was holding back, especially when it got to its stalk and chase sequences, the other key element in any good slasher's bag of tricks. Charlie had a cool costume, he wielded a diverse arsenal of murder weapons, and he walked the walk by making for a threatening presence every time it became clear that he was in the area, such that when he burst out of the shadows, you could reasonably expect somebody to get their ass whooped. Last but certainly not least came the ending, the part that this film was made for, and I can assure you, it was as mean-spirited as it got -- and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way. This is a film that knows exactly why you might want to watch it, and it delivers in a very satisfying way.

The Bottom Line

Warts and all, this is exactly the movie you'd expect when you think of a slasher parody of My Super Sweet Sixteen, nothing more and nothing less. Some parts of it were pretty slow and hokey, but overall, this one is a hidden gem for both slasher fans and children of the 2000s.