Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

Three wacky teenage girls in cheerleader outfits are all giddy because they are running across a dark, empty, fog filled field on their way to meet some boys. Why they are running across this empty field in the dark to meet some boys… we can’t tell you. I’m assuming school is out since it is nighttime, I’m assuming they probably don’t live in a dorm room and they shouldn’t all be together running around stupidly and I would guess one of them should have access to a car to drive them where they need to go. But that’s just silly me putting way too much into this little movie ‘Lure: Teen Fight Club’ than necessary. You see if they weren’t running in this field at night, then one of the cheerleaders wouldn’t have seen the cute rabbit in the wood cage and thus she wouldn’t have cuddled it and then she wouldn’t have gotten smashed in the face with a shovel. Wouldn’t have happened. And now we have three missing cheerleaders, but where would they be?

The task of discovering this information will fall to police detective Maggie Rawdon (Jessica Sonneborn) who will be sent undercover at the local high school to get to the bottom of this. Actually, check that. She’s being sent to the high school by her boss (Lamont Thompson) to make sure no more girls get snatched up… because it looks like the police in this town have written off the missing girls as a loss. How one lone police officer is going to protect about a thousand high school girls is beyond me but we are not going to worry about either. And if we had an awards show dedicated to Straight to DVD movies, actor Lamont Thompson would be in the running for Best Performance as an Incredibly Pissed Off Police Captain in a Horror Movie.

So Maggie is in school undercover. Yeah, she looks like she’s about thirty but that’s cool because all of the girls in this high school look to be in their thirties. Her captain enrolls her on the field hockey team so she can ‘fit in’. Maggie totally dominates these high school chicks with her superior skills, then in a fit of rage she starts to choke one of the little bitches. Maggie has completely forgotten that she is a thirty year old cop and these girls are like sixteen. Maggie is also excited because the team has a game coming up. If Maggie actually got to play in that game I afraid the team would have to forfeit that game since having thirty year old cops as ringers is probably against AAU rules. Fortunately it doesn’t get that far.

Maggie has become friends, more or less, with the school’s bitch crew. Or rather she has a car. This crew which consists of Supreme bitch Brittany (Augie Duke), virginal bitch Lauren (Paulie Rojas), slutty bitch Tina (Sita Young) and drugged out bitch Brooke (Casey Reinhardt) are all going to a rave and Maggie is driving. Tragically our girls have been rerouted and they are actually going to get smashed in the face with shovels, tazed, caged, dressed up like dolls, stuck in a ring and forced to fight other girls to the death. And only Maggie’s lovesick boyfriend Officer Tommy (Michael McLafferty) can save them. Oh, and the stuttering sophomore (Eric McIntyre) who will be Tommy’s sidekick. Good luck girls, it’s looking like you’re gonna die.

We can tell you right off the bat the main problem we had with ‘Lure: Teen Fight Club’ is that there just wasn’t enough Teen Fight Clubbing going on. Admittedly the few fight scenes we did get to see didn’t look like they were choreographed by Woo Yuen Ping or anything like that but they were good enough and the movie does have ‘Teen Fight Club’ in its title so I wanted to see more teens fighting at the club. What I got in lieu of Teen Fight Clubbing was the privilege of spending an awful lot of quality time with quite possibly the most irritating group of teenage girls ever put to film. If the goal of Bitchy Brittany and Slutty Tina was to build my anticipation of them getting in a ring and getting bludgeoned to death, then director Bill McAdams Jr. succeeded marvelously at this because that moment couldn’t come soon enough. Truly, the vast majority of this movie was hanging out with these girls and it was absolutely no fun. Hanging out with virginal Lauren wasn’t so bad because actress Paulie Rojas is so damned adorable but she too was starting to get on a nerve.

There were other issues, but these issues were less a detriment to this film and just added to the overall comedy of the film, intended or otherwise. Like the undercover cop choking out one of the students she was sent undercover to protect. Or her cop ex-boyfriend arbitrarily showing up at her undercover gig completely trying to blow her cover. Or this same cop boyfriend saving the stuttering sophomore from getting busted at the real rave party only to give him a baseball bat and put his life at risk as the two of them attempt to take down the illegal Teen Fight Club. Or the mystery of who is running this secret underground fight ring, always hidden in the shadows, when we’ve only met one other character in this movie who could possibly be that guy. Or this same mysterious guy apparently having superpowers.

True enough ‘Lure: Teen Fight Club’ was painful to watch at times, mainly because watching bitchy teenage girls be bitchy isn’t exactly my idea of good time, but watching them get in a ring and get punched in the face is much closer to my idea of a good time. Well acted, competently produced for a low budget feature, the bad guy had some great dialog written for him and Lamont Thompson is an acting genius. But just like I’ve never seen the movie ‘Mean Girls’ I wouldn’t have picked this up either if it were correctly named ‘Hanging Out with Bitchy Teen Girls Forever who Fight Near the End’. I need more Teen Fight Clubbing. I just need more Teen Fight Clubbing.