F

To paraphrase one character’s description of the lives of most
of the spoiled rich kids populating Mary Lambert’s would-be
thriller, “The In Crowd” isn’t a movie–it’s a J. Crew
catalogue. Junk mail, junk movie. The script starts with the
decidedly dubious notion that an incarcerated (and admittedly
violence-prone) purported nymphomaniac (sweet heroine Adrien,
played by Lori Heuring) would be released to take a summer
job at a posh coastal country club catering to the wealthy
and overpampered. It then takes this idiotic premise and adds
further layers of imbecility to it as Adrien links up with the
local swinging crowd, and gets burned by their simmering feuds
and long-buried secrets. Eventually the picture winds up as
a crackpot amalgam of “Cruel Intentions,” “Dead Ringer” and
“Psycho,” looking a lot like a bad WB Network series but
coming across as even sillier.

Adrien’s new troubles begin when she falls in with Brittany
(Susan Ward), the local princess who takes the lass under her
wing, thereby causing wonderment and chagrin among her bevy
of pals. Before long Adrien is attending oceanside bashes
featuring lots of bikini-clad bimbos and ostentatiously horny
dudes (just call this segment of the picture “Beach Party
Stinko,” with a hint of homoeroticism added to make it seem
contemporary) and getting close to dim-bulb golf instructor Matt
(Matthew Settle), on whom Brittany also has her eye–a fact
that soon causes some antagonism between the girls. Many
further complications follow, including a couple of murders,
before a final confrontation featuring what is surely the most
absurd chase and funniest cat-fight in recent cinema history.
The denouement will have you shaking your head in disbelief;
the rest of your body should be rocking with laughter.

This screenplay is so terrible that nobody could have rescued
it, but Mary Lambert (who did the two “Pet Sematary” pictures)
dawdles so much, padding the plot with sluggish sequences
leading absolutely nowhere, that she manages to make it even
more ludicrous than it might have been. The acting is
simply dreadful. Heuring comes across as–if you can believe
this–a poverty-row version of Tori Spelling, and Ward overdoes
the bitchiness so badly that she makes Shannen Doherty look
like Meryl Streep. The rest of the cast resemble (and are
about as multi-dimensional as) the models appearing in ads
in CQ or Vanity Fair, with the exception of Hugh Daniel Kelly
and Tess Harper, who play two of the dumbest doctors even put
on celluloid.

“The In Crowd” is one clique you’d be very wise to avoid any
contact with.