Retrospective Film Review

Cruel Intentions (1999) • 25 Years Later — bittersweet symphony of ’90s nostalgia

Two vicious step-siblings of an elite Manhattan prep school make a wager: to deflower the new headmaster’s daughter before the start of term.

Placebo. Ryan Phillippe. The raunchy teen comedy. You can still find them around today. But Cruel Intentions is a bittersweet symphony of 1990s nostalgia. Bittersweet because of the stinging irreverence in the writing and directing of Roger Kumble. “Da bomb” ’90s youth culture is all but dead, making way for the glib egoism of the new millennium.

Teen-driven comedies and horrors boomed in the 1980s, and a decade later, both genres were hurtling inevitably towards the same societal Y2K. Jawbreaker, Drop Dead Gorgeous, Teaching Mrs. Tingle, Idle Hands, and yes, Cruel Intentions, all came out in 1999 and centred around teen deaths. Actual horrors like Scream (1996), The Faculty (1998), and Disturbing Behavior (1998) feel positively quaint. Like his contemporaries, Kumble doesn’t ask ‘how do you do, fellow kids?’ so much…