*/****
starring Busy Philipps, Erika Christensen, Victor Garber, Raphael Sbarge
written and directed by Paul F. Ryan
by Walter Chaw A standard good girl-meets-bad girl formula wrapped around a gloss on high-school shooting (our own perverse millennial take on the fin-de-siècle phenomenon), Home Room presents its vision of post-traumatic stress disorder with such hamhandedness that it threatens to spawn the same in the viewer. Essentially an Afterschool Special complete with pre-packaged messages about the evil of cigarettes, the secret pain of goth chicks, the importance of not taking the Lord's name in vain, and the crass stupidity of well-meaning cops and school administrators, the picture is not only awful but also possessed of the potential for being truly offensive to the victims of the atrocities off which it pings. When a cigarette passing from one pubescent hand to another (Erika Christensen: early-'50s good girl; Busy Philipps: late-'80s bad girl) is laced with the kind of gravitas reserved for the exchange of the Olympic torch to heroically-paralyzed Democrats, you know you're in for a long haul. Home Room is the sort of liberal group hug every bit as ignorant as the actual fundamentalist Christian response that erupts after a killing spree–all of it just proving that 13 years later, Heathers remains the final word on these matters.
