Chastity Bites – probably should have been better than it is

Even since the original ‘Scream’ film back in 1997, it’s been popular for horror films to kind of parody themselves and point out their own clichés while satirising the genre.  Sometimes it works well, as in ‘Cabin in the Woods’ while other times it kind of falls a bit flat.  Here, in ‘Chastity Bites,’ it sadly falls into the latter.  We open in a high school where a clique of (stereotypical, if you’ve seen any teen movie ever – horror, or otherwise) ‘popular’ girls rules the class with their status and, of course, shallowness.  The two – equally clichéd – unpopular girls (who dress conservatively and don’t want to jump into bed with the first high school jock who takes off his football helmet) walk around discussing poetry, philosophy and generally do their best to show us – the audience – how downtrodden and relatable they are.  Then a – clichéd British – villain comes along in the form of a woman who teaches the virtues of chastity to the young, who wants spokespeople to promote her cause.  Naturally, the vacuous ‘popular’ bimbos all sign up (despite their blatant lack of respect for the rules).  However, we quickly discover that this woman has a darker motive and wants to suck the souls of the young (or something).  She’s a baddie – that’s all you need to know and it’s up to the unpopular duo to ‘out’ her terrible scheme.

So, it’s a kind of ‘teenagers versus evil’ kind of affair and, like I say, it kind of knows it’s a bit dumb and does its best to play up to that fact so that it never takes itself too seriously.  It does this by attempting to satirise today’s obsession with beauty and social standing among teens (and in some cases adults!).  This could work, but sadly it’s just not ‘fresh’ enough to really say anything new or in a different way than we’ve already seen before (and better).  Allison Scagliotti (most famous for her awesomely cool performance as ‘Claudia’ in ‘Warehouse 13’) is the lead and she does her best to use her natural quirky charm to good effect.  However, the script just isn’t up to her talent and the jokes start to fall flat while the whole thing descends into predictability.

It may be a young adult horror/comedy, but it’s not really funny enough to be a straight out comedy and there isn’t enough gore to really make it that bloodthirsty.  They even try to throw in one of the most forced love interest sub-plots ever seen in cinema.  The male love interest only occupies a few scenes of screen time and could have been done away with all together and you’d never notice.

You know a film is getting desperate when you see all the visual promotional advertising surrounding the film depicts shots of girls in short ‘fantasy’ schoolgirl costumes.  I can promise you nothing like this ever appears in the film itself!  All together it’s just a missed opportunity to say something worthwhile about a facet of popular culture than needs a bit of mainstream debunking.  Avoid.  You won’t miss much.  Sorry Allison – you were brilliant in ‘Warehouse 13.’

4/10 You can watch this film while you're doing the ironing (you'll still get the general gist of it)