The Hot Chick

Teen movies are pushing the lid on the trash can. First, there was sex (American Pie), then there was no-sex (Just Married) and now "you're my best friend and you're a guy."

Rob Schneider is Adam Sandler's buddy. As a comic actor, he fits into the aggressive small person category, not quite Danny DeVito, but vertically challenged in a terrier's tantrum sort of way. Here he plays a petty thief who has the social habits of a sewer rat. Words such as empathy and consideration slide off his psyche like a bulimic's breakfast.

Thanks to a pair of magic earrings, he turns into Jessica (Rachel McAdams), a Clueless-style high school teen queen, who knows the bitch moves by heart and has a rattlesnake's tongue in her mouth, while prancing through shopping malls with her gang of well wicked babettes.

Jessica is a tease. She has the looks of Mena Suvari, but won't let hunky boyfriend Billy (Matthew Lawrence) anywhere near second base. He's climbing up the wall and she's loving the power trip. Once she becomes a criminal and starts attacking people in dark alleys and robbing them, she's out of the picture.

Ladies loo jokes and girl talk contribute to the pattern of humour, as they prepare for the cheerleading competition and, of course, the prom. Schneider's character confides in April (Anna Faris), who doesn't seem phased by her best friend Jessica metamorphosing into a chubby little guy with a six o'clock shadow. The problem is Billy. He/she lusts after him, which is odd since she wouldn't give him any before and now that she's a he, it's hanky-please-and-panky-now. Naturally, Billy's scared rigid and runs into the arms of Jessica's nemesis, the second prettiest girl in school.

Obviously, low grade American comedy doesn't travel and the teen scene in California is on a different level of vapidity. Also, Schneider has the appeal of fried Mars bars at a slimming club.