Post by Mark T. Locker.

It seems my best friend and I have developed a new tradition: whenever we find ourselves alone with a couple hours to kill we find a new high school movie to watch. Most of the time these are absolutely terrible movies. To be honest, I’m not sure we have watched any good movies together, save for the ones I’ve dragged him to (but to be fair, the bad ones are usually better). We have seen all the Resident Evil movies together, each exponentially worse and more confusing than the last. Yet they keep making them and we keep looking forward to them. Last summer I saw Sixteen Candles for the first time and She’s the Man for the first and last time, both with him. A couple weeks ago he came to visit and while everyone else was in bed, we found a movie called Drive Me Crazy, buried deep within Netflix.

I was delighted. It stars Melissa Joan Hart who I had grown to love during adolescence as the star of Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains it All. I guess she did Sabrina the Teenage Witch too. Either way, this movie shows us in glaring clarity why she could never break into the big screen scene. She’s not bad; she’s just not terribly charismatic. ANYWAYS. The most surprising part about this movie turned out to be the fact that it was written by Rob Thomas, best known for Veronica Mars and iZombie. Both my friend and I are huge fans so suddenly this got a lot more interesting.

The plot is way less interesting than the writer. Classic story: popular girl and “bad boy” make an agreement to couple up, each for their own particular end. Naturally, their selfish reasons for fake dating all fall away when they let their prejudices go and see each other for who they really are. I won’t say this was a good movie. But it was deeply enjoyable. There’s something comforting about high school dramas. It’s why The Breakfast Club and the other Brat Pack movies were so fantastic. I’m not sure these 90s versions have the same je ne sais quoi but that will never stop me from watching every last one of them.