Sugar & Spice
As somehow who watches a considerable amount of films, I must say I have one weakness when it comes to films I like: CAMP! The more, the better. Which is why when I first saw the previews for the new cheerleader flick Sugar & Spice, I was hooked from the get go. Who wouldn’t want to see this film about bitchy, naive cheerleaders knock over a bank because one of their own gets pregnant? Judging by the box office receipts ($12.5 million so far), not many. Which is a shame because this is one fun flick! This has EVERYTHING!
Sugar & Spice tells the story of the Lincoln High A-squad Cheerleaders (including American Beauty’s Mena Suvari, Melissa George, Sara Marsh, and Road Trip’s Rachel Blanchard, also of the UPN incarnation of Clueless) who band together to rob a bank to help out Diane (Marley Shelton), the captain of the squad and her quarterback husband, Jack (James Marsden of last summer’s X-Men), when the balancing act between pregnancy, school, and practice becomes too much for poor little Diane to take. The tale is told in flashback to police by a bitchy member of the B-squad, Lisa, (Marla Sokoloff, of TV’s The Practice, redeeming herself for the truly hellish Dude, Where’s My Car?) who is so blinded by jealousy, she’ll do anything to ruin the girls if it means getting on the A-squad.
Many people have probably dismissed this film as a mindless teen flick, which is a shame because it actually has a great edginess to it missing from most films like it. It has the girls analyzing robbery sequences from films like Point Break, Heat, The Apple Dumpling Gang, and Reservoir Dogs and rationalizing their pro-life stance by quoting Madonna’s "Papa Don’t Preach." It has them rehearsing their robbery by knocking off the lunchlady in their school’s cafeteria and thereby asking the age-old question: "How does a school turn a profit on cafeteria food when it only makes $200?" It has great dialogue, too: Lisa just happens to be shopping during the team’s robbery and witnessing the girl’s choreography is moved to comment on their "illegal dismount."
The cast is uniformly perfect, playing the perpetually perky (Shelton), bitchy (Suvari, Sokoloff), naive (Blanchard, Marsden), and just plain spacey (Melissa George’s fantasy about Conan O’Brian and leather furniture is one running gag that actually stays funny throughout the film). The film’s director, first-timer Francine McDougall keeps things moving along, giving the film a candy-colored look and a femme-rock driven soundtrack. It never gets boring in here, even at the film’s clever ending.
I recommend this film without any hesitation. I loved it! I do need to say, however, that I am, at times, alone in my love of teen camp classics like Cruel Intentions and Wild Things. And the last time I recommended a film with this much campyness to a paying customer, it was Sharon Stone is Sam Raimi’s playful, revisionist Western The Quick and the Dead. After the film, I got yelled at for about ten minutes about how bad it was. Consider yourself warned.