Pretty Cool (2002)

Best movie of this year hands down!

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

While mucking around on the school computer trying to change his grades, geeky Howard Duckell, receives a zap that imbues him with mind-controlling powers. Which he uses to embarrass his sister, school bully, and help his equally dorky friend out. He also has to deal with a scientist who's trying to take the powers away from him and get the girl he's interested in without using said powers. None of the above are particular funny in any sense. Furthermore, the film that this seems to want to emulate "Zapped" is endlessly better so watch that movie instead.Eye Candy: Cecilia Bergqvist gets topless; Stacy Burke, Brandy Miller, & Darby O'Riley provide the T&A; Sandy Wasko shows everything (Summer Altice & Cindy Campbell get topless in the DVD deleted scenes) DVD Extras: Director's Commentary; slide-show gallery; 23 deleted & extended scenes (with nudity); Promotional trailer for this film; and Trailer for "the Hazing"Easter Egg: In the extras menu Highlight the teacher's panties and click on them for a short clip of Amy Brasette (no nudity)

OK, so this is a low-budget take-off of eighties teen sex comedies like Zapped and Weird Science. But if you can accept sometimes painfully hokey lines and antics, then there are nice comic bits in this movie along with some nice eye-candy girls. There are also many groan- inducing comic bits as well, which is I guess part of the package. It at least keeps moving, and has a variety of different types of mental powers gags, rather than dull repetition. Amy Brassette is great though underutilized as Howard's nagging older sister, with occasional bits like an amazing run of impressions in a single take. Cecilia Bergqvist was hokey as the supposedly-plain-but-clearly-hot teacher, but she made up for it by being hilarious as a teenage boy in her body (particularly the hilarious shot in the bathroom). The others are mostly mediocre. Incidentally, the DVD I got was loaded with stuff for such a low-budget production -- I'm not sure how they managed that.

Pretty Cool is basically a homage to films like Weird Science and Zapped!, wrapped up in a parody of early Tom Cruise films, like Risky Business and Color of Money. It follows the adventures of a lovable loser who meets the girl of his dreams and then discovers he has to go to summer school and won't have time to try to get to know her. Deciding to break into the school's computer to change his grades (shades of WarGames there, another eighties classic), he inadvertently receives a transmission from a secret lab in Europe, giving him awesome mental powers.Discovering he can read minds as well as control them, our hero has some juvenile fun at first, giving us some nice T&A. But his escapades threaten his relationship with his dream girl, and he's determined to win her without using his powers on her. Then there's the mysterious woman from the lab out to track down whoever has the power, her thought transference necklace, and a host of other complications. There's a lot going on in this movie, and while it doesn't all make sense necessarily, the movie isn't meant to be taken very seriously anyway.Since the main character is basically a decent guy, most of the film's mischief comes from his unscrupulous best friend, who cackles maniacally at the prospect of all the fun to be had with the powers. He ends up in over his head a lot of the time, but it leads to some very funny situations. The film is basically a boy meets girl affair with some nice T&A and a good deal of slapstick humor. It's not the greatest story ever told by any stretch, but it's definitely better than average for the straight to video market. Worth a rental at the least.

It's impossible for me to remember a worse movie than this. I fast-forwarded the stupidest parts of the movie, but the rest was still just awful. Plain awful. Awful and stupid.The sex scenes were not interesting or compelling. The supposedly funny scenes were not.The fact that it was re-cut and re-released under a completely different name should give you a clue as to the movie's worth.The fact that they put the actor who voices the Chief on Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex in stockings and a garter just makes me want to cry.Avoid this movie at all costs. You will never regain any time wasted watching it.