RETRO REVIEW: Cruel Intentions

Struggling for review content, I decided to search the film annals of 1999 for something to watch; with these movies celebrating their 20 year anniversary, there isn’t a better time to find an old classic and see how it appeals all these years later.

Naturally, my gay ass landed on Cruel Intentions: the movie that was to be Sarah Michelle Gellar’s greatest movie success and helped her escape the Buffy bubble. Well, aside from Scooby Doo, of course. And we all know which one is more important.

Of all the Dawson’s Creek-on-crack teen movies of the late ‘90s that preached… let’s say unsavoury sexual politics, it is the movie that revelled in how inappropriate and admittedly cruel these turn of the millennium movies were that stands the test of time. We’re meant to understand that Sarah Michelle Gellar and Ryan Phillippe With Bleached Tips are manipulative, detached people that are not to be emulated. That is what makes the teen debauchery so fun – by making it clear that these upper class twits are playing sick games of the wealthy, Cruel Intentions stands the test of time in a way that She’s the Man has not.

The kissing scene in Central Park would still be legendary if the movie was released today, and while I’m as gay as they come, Selma Blair (I hope the best for her) and SMG’s tongue scene still has me having second thoughts about just how dedicated I am to staunch homosexuality. Wooh boy.

9/10: Daphne before Fred