High on Schrooms-ical.

Three words describe HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3: SENIOR YEAR: Ab. Bombin’. Nation. Once again, choreographer Kenny Ortega directs, and clueless, unoriginal screenwriter Peter Barsocchini writes what will eventually end up a laughing fart from the buttocks of Satan.

Zac Efron returns as Troy Bolton, beefcake boy-beauty of East High School, with his indeterminate-Latina girlfriend Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens, getting whiter and whiter as the series progresses), as do the rest of the principal cast; Ashley Tisdale as Sharpay the overacting villainess, Lucas Grabeel as Ryan, Sharpay’s ambiguously-straight choreographer brother, and Corbin Bleu as Chad, Troy’s token black best friend.

HSM 3 is the first of the HSM series to be released in cinemas (as opposed to the previous two TV releases), with a script copied-and-pasted from HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2. Change slug-line from END OF SCHOOL YEAR to SENIOR YEAR and hey presto! Thirteen inconceivably irritating songs later, we have another sequel to belch at a public too incognizant to realize they’re watching the same story and listening to the same songs.

There’s the “We’ve Got This Moment” song, the “We Need To Be Together” song, the “Breakup” song, the “I Need To Be Myself” song, the “What Do I Do With My Life?” song, and the “We’ll Always Have Each Other” song. All with shockingly original titles like Just Wanna Be With You (which Troy and Gabriella sing with absolutely no understanding of what ‘being together’ entails), A Night To Remember (sung by the cast about their innocent prom with no intimation of drunkenness, sexuality or any memorable anecdotes, just an abiding adherence to over-enunciating what fun they’re having), and The Boys Are Back (sung by Troy and Corbin for no reason at all).

Movie follows exact same flow chart as its predecessor, where the hero has to decide between pussy and career (and he somehow wins out on both, because – teen movie), and where the heroine leaves the hero to pursue her dreams and “Go Her Own Way” which apparently means giving up her dreams to follow the hero.

Exact same Troy punch-dance during the “What Do I Do With My Life?” song, called Scream, which he performs in the deserted theater at midnight, where nonetheless, a spectacular lightshow accompanies his enabled white upper-class wailing. While the drama teacher, Ms. Darbus, is sitting in the empty auditorium, watching him like some kind of perve. Sitting in the dark obviously, because until Troy got there, the lights were not on, giving some mimsy excuse on what she was doing – supposedly figuring how to substitute one girl for another in the school play, which could’ve been done in two seconds at her office or house. She reveals she sent a letter to Julliard on Troy’s behalf, which was some kind of damning plot point that we couldn’t care less about at this point. All I want to know is, Why were you sitting there in the darkness, you crazy old bird?

Gabriella on the phone tragically bemoans to Troy that since she’s left town, there is no reason for her to return for the prom, because, “What am I gonna do, come to prom and then leave again? Then come to graduation and leave again?” To which Troy simply whiffles like a bitch, instead of reminding her, “No, you’re meant to come to prom, fuck me, then leave again; then come to graduation, fuck me, then leave again.”

Troy’s father (Bart Johnson), is no help in the girlfriend department, although, just being two years older than Troy, you’d think he’d make a good wingman.

Troy visits Gabriella in faraway Somewhere-U and accosts her from a tree while wearing his full ducky prom suit, whereupon they dance and sing and it’s so romantic and then – they kiss! ACTUALLY KISS! For the first time in any HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL! Who allowed this pornography up in this teen romancical? Satan, was that you? Is this your worm-riddled hand at work?

Whatever the annoyance quotient with the auto-tuned songs, the insufferable band pretending to play their instruments, the overacting and egregious non-plot, we must give credit where it’s due – the dancing by the principals is sometimes quite astounding. You can bullshit all you want on vocal recordings – which the principals are supposedly singing themselves – but you can’t fool the camera when it comes to well-rehearsed dance moves. Well done, bitches! Although, the musical numbers containing these dances are as insulting to our intelligence as the First World Problems these kids bemoan constantly that we’re supposedly meant to give one rat’s ass about.

Though the under-tweens and the gay community will find much to love in this quantum shitfest shot like a rainbow-cannon at their demo, HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 3 is the absolute worst of the trilogy and arguably the most offensive movie ever produced by mankind, irretrievably damning the human race to eternal flame. Game, Set, Match: Satan.

END

Cruisin’ for a Bruise-ical.

There are three words to describe the songs in HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2: Un. Bear. Able. And the word “musical” is in the actual title. False advertising. Did someone consult Satan on which tonal modes would cause mortals to retch like chemotherapy victims? Director Kenny Ortega and writer Peter Barsocchini did indeed. Upon researching the precursor to this film, I see that Satan was in fact involved in all creative aspects of that insufferable movie. (My research involved exclusively reading my own review of HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. Hey, it worked for Dick Cheney with WMD and Niger.)

Disney Channel continues its unholy collaboration with Ortega, Satan, the sin-blue eyes of Zac Efron, and the songwriters who know those bilious tonal modes, to force on flailing humankind HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL 2, a deathwish put to the beat of teen dream.

The same teen cast have all returned to make ass-faces of themselves, and we find them in their last day of school, as they sing/Auto-Tune an embarrassing song about summer vacation and what innocent things they intend to do besides get drunk and laid like normal kids their age. For a bunch of high school kids, they’re having way too much fun singing and dancing and not having sex. If people have this much fun doing anything, shouldn’t we examine their brains for some kind of nutrient deficiency? You doubt Satan was involved? Only the Prince of Hate could pen the lyric, “School’s out, scream and shout…” Oooh, can I have some soap to wash out my soul?…

Perky Gabriella (the startlingly beautiful Vanessa Hudgens) and her platonic boy toy Troy (the startlingly beautiful Zac Efron) duet about “now the time is all our own!” and I wonder, Have you little tarts bonked yet since the last film? You pretty pretty people with no blemishes or skin tags or anal warts. Will Disney allow its underage demographic to visualize what Troy and Vanessa might be doing with their time “all their own” by letting them at least share a kiss or something? Nope. Satan steps in (i.e. the MPAA) and each time Troy gets his face closer than fellatio distance to Gabriella, someone coitus interruptuses them.

Sharpay (stunningly bland blond Ashley Tisdale), in her quest to get within reverse-cowgirl distance of Troy, lands him a job at her parents’ All-White country club, where they hold an annual “musical contest” (how convenient), which she and her gay brother Ryan (Lucas Grabeel) always win. What? He’s not gay? Okay, then what he’s doing to her during musical numbers is just plain incest.

Troy immediately scams all his friends into jobs at the country club as well. What, you may ask, is the black guy doing there? (Troy’s best friend Chad, played by Corbin Bleu, the only cast member besides Efron who is a likeable presence.) Uh, he’s basically white, no? As is the Latina Hudgens, who has more Caucasian in her than when real-life boyfriend Efron is buried balls-deep. Besides these two marginally ethnic anomalies, the rest of the pasty cast are white enough to be poster kids for sickle cell anemia. But just to show us they have nothing against minorities, the Aryan-fascist Disney producers let the fat chick dance. How precious. And by precious I mean Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire.

In her quest to get Troy to sleep with her– I mean, sing with her, Sharpay blackmails Troy into a new upper class lifestyle even more privileged and enabled than the one he’s already leading in his big house in All-White Americana with his father who looks maybe four years older than him (Bart Johnson). She keeps Troy away from his friends by burdening him with many more jobs (like golf instructor, waiter, baseball groundsman and douchebag), and he starts hanging with the rich peeps and neglecting his friends. This makes the mildly Latina chick mildly jealous, so she mildly holds hands with the gay brother (which in Disney parlance means rape-sex), and best friend Chad whines that he wants his basketball back (which in gay parlance means he wants his basket ball-back).

Sharpay (we wonder why her parents named her after a species of dog – Shar-Pei – and then she opens her big mouth and the reason becomes patently clear) and Gabriella expose a little more cleavage this time round, to make up for the songs which are blander and flatter than HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. Sharpay has also been turned back into the snide c-word she originally was at the outset of the first movie, even though everyone reconciled and danced together at the end of that travesty. Hypocrites? Deceivers? Two-faced? Or just the same old satanic mixed messages that don’t make any sense when applied to real life? Yeah, don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do something; do what you wanna do!! But as soon as Sharpay tries to lure Troy away from his lower class clique (which is “doing what she wants to do”), she’s a rich bitch; as soon as Troy wants to hang with the pro ballers (which is “doing what he wants to do”) he’s an a-hole. Get your messages straight before burping at us from the anal cavity of hell, movie!

Admittedly, all that choreography is hard work and it comes together energetically. There is definitely an audience for these satanic works of chunder, but I suspect it’s humans under 15, gay guys and chicks. With such a niche demographic, how did this series catch on like a virulent disease? Easy: those three groups are the loudest demos – they’ll spread anything like a virulent disease…

Luckily, I was exposed to Zac Efron (down, girls!) in other films before HSM, so I know he has the acting chops to be destined for greater futures than these debacles would have us imagine. In line with teen dream flow chart, he sings the “Gotta Turn My Life Around” song, complete with punch dance. This movie has everything! Then jilted Gabriella sings the “My Heart Is Breaking” song, called I Gotta Go My Own Way, which apparently means turning up the next day to come running back to Troy because she’s a girl and stuff. Luckily, he doesn’t kiss her, or he’d get girl germs. Or maybe he does accidentally kiss her off-camera because his final act (after singing and dancing like a tool in front of a band of whitebread pussies playing unplugged electric instruments with no P.A.) is to leap clothes-first into the pool – to mayhaps wash the cooties off his hunky body? (Is it just me, or in the final shot when they’re both floating in the pool during the fadeout, does Gabriella look like she’s about to drown in between her fake smiles?)

Sigh of contentment… aaah, that soap feels good on my soul in this shower of redemption… Who’s that rubbing my back? Is that you, Satan?…

AAAAAAAAAGGGHH!

END

High School Douche-ical.

Disney collaborated with Satan and coaxed him to fart his pus-festering feculence onto the TV airwaves and call it HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. It is not such a surprise to those of us who know Disney regularly consorts with the Prince of Feces, but even so, this unholy flatulence was far beyond Satan’s usual anal excretions of Disney pedophile porn (i.e. after-school TV shows with impossibly smooth-skinned teens), televised Republican Primary Debates or that program about the whores of Babylon (aka KEEPING UP WITH THE KARDASHIANS). With HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL his satanic majesty laughs worms at our intelligence as a species being hacked down to primal idiocy due to this film’s unfounded, inexplicable success.

Troy (Zac Efron) is the popular high school basketball jock team captain; Gabriella (Vanessa Hudgens) is the unpopular new girl and mathlete nerd. From different sides of the tracks, these two Meet Cute on a karaoke stage (n.b. karaoke = sign of the devil) and discover their mutual love of miming in perfect key like Milli Vanilli (= sign of the devil). They get it into their perfectly unblemished heads to audition for the High School Musical, but their best friends (led by Corbin Bleu for Troy, and Monique Coleman for Gabriella) try to tear them apart because jocks don’t like nerds, and nerds are scared/hoping that jocks will ass-rape them.

Jocks do not sing and dance, so Troy is hesitant on whether to tell his jock clique of his newfound guilty pleasure. Oh, and by the way, just wondering, Troy, were you planning on telling them about your forbidden love of singing and dancing before or after you and the whole team singing and dancing on the basketball court?

And there’s rival teen blonde Sharpay (plain-jane Ashley Tisdale, desperately miscast as the snobby flamboyant chick), who has been the star of the Musical for years with her gay brother Ryan (Lucas Grabeel). Wait, he’s not gay? Girlfriend, my gay-dar is doing the Macarena over here. Anyway, it’s a musical. Everyone’s gay. Along with the rest of the school, Sharpay will do whatever it takes to sabotage the pairing of Troy and Gabriella. Mixed messages will fly like flaming arrows from purgatory at the impressionable teens of Earth; angels will battle devils for the souls of the young. And the devils will win.

Signs that prove incontrovertibly HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL is the work of the devil:

• Upon its release, it became the most successful film that Disney Channel ever produced.
• The first Disney Channel movie to have a theatrical sequel.
• Soundtrack was the best-selling album in the United States 2006, certified quadruple platinum.
• The DVD (May 2006) created a sales record when 1.2 million copies were sold in its first six days, making it the fastest-selling television film of all time…

Don’t tell me that writer Peter Barsocchini and director Kenny Ortega didn’t go down to the Crossroads and sell their souls to Beelzebub in return for overwhelming success on a breathlessly underwhelming product.

No matter what else Kenny Ortega does in his storied career, it’s pertinent to note that he helmed and choreographed the 1984 music video for Billy Squier’s Rock Me Tonite. Yes, that video – showing rocker Squier prancing around his pastel bedroom in a pink t-shirt playing air-guitar decidedly not like a rocker; considered to be the video that destroyed Squier’s career for its absolute, unequivocal homosexual overtones. In Squier’s own recollection [from Wikipedia]: “He was touring at the time, and recalls that as soon as the video came out, he stopped selling out shows, in some cases playing to half-empty arenas.” … That’s the director/co-choreographer of HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL. Does it all start to fall into place now? Ortega, Disney, Satan…

In the world of Disney, everyone is of a neuter gender, and Troy and Gabriella only want to “be together” for academic reasons, rather than to have sexual intercourse, spawn offspring or even kiss on the mouth. Thus, Troy’s skin can only come in contact with Gabriella’s through hand-to-hand contact. The number of times he and Gabriella come up forehead-to-forehead and are then interrupted from even kissing was a ploy by the MPAA (= sign of the devil) to give boy viewers blue balls. Because the devil, as we all know, is AGAINST procreation, being a Republican. Also, as all boys know, Troy might get girl germs.

The overacting will make you nauseous, the simpleton ethos will make you enraged, the music will make you question humanity’s vaunted position on the evolutionary tree. There are three words to describe the songs in HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL: In. Suffer. Able. Written by Matthew Gerrard, Robbie Nevil, David Lawrence, Faye Greenberg, Randy Petersen, Andy Dodd and others, specifically designed to embarrass anyone over the age of 20 with their inscrutable, uncatchy melodies and child-chorus treacle, at least most of the actors supposedly laid their own vocal tracks to the songs they are miming to onscreen. There’s something to be said for that. And Auto-Tune.

Now I’m willing to admit that each high school generation has their special moment; a nostalgic time, place, event from their youth that their bitter adult souls can never recapture; a miasma of memories connected to people, events, movies, first sex, first car, first sex in first car, that mean nothing to anyone outside their privileged circle. My high school clique cut its teeth on and made its memories with GREASE (and this movie was initially written as a sequel to that film!). I remember at year’s end practically the whole class gathering at someone’s home to view that film and by movie’s end, many of us were so taken with the camaraderie of those high schoolers about to step into the world that we almost tearfully took down everyone’s contact information in the class. And never used it. But there’s a real special place next to my dead heart for that nostalgic moment in time when that film united us all psychologically. Ergo, a real special place for that film too. No matter how goofy it looks in retrospect. So too, I can imagine HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL will have the same effect on youngsters who see it at that certain point in life when all that teen guff matters.

But I hafta ask: wasn’t there anything between GREASE and HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL with just a little more street cred? What have high school kids been latching onto over the last 30 years? Is there nothing to bridge the gap between the cool swagger of Travolta and the effeminate bug-eyeing of Efron?

And I fully realize GREASE has its HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL shortcomings. There’s singing and dancing in both, at just about the same level of ridiculousness, and the same message is espoused: do what you wanna do, be what you wanna be – nothing outrageously original – and the same flow chart of boy-girl relationship stultified by others is played out, with the same GREASE staging of the couples pairing off during the end dance number – but why is GREASE still so much more credible, as a movie and as a memory?

Because GREASE wasn’t made by Satan.

END