The Film

Buy at Amazon USA Buy at Amazon Canada or Compare Prices A standard good girl-meets-bad girl formula wrapped around a gloss on high-school shootings (our own perverse millennial take on the fin-de-siecles phenomenon), Home Room presents its vision of post-traumatic stress disorder with such ham-handedness that it threatens to spawn the same in the viewer. Essentially an Afterschool Special complete with pre-packaged messages about the evil of smoking, 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 chubby 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 thirteen years later, Heathers remains the final word on these matters.-Walter Chaw

The DVD
Accompanying the repellent Home Room on Columbia Tri-Star's DVD release is a 7-minute featurette in which cast and crew (well, writer-director Paul F. Ryan) congratulate themselves for making a film about Columbine that isn't moralistic; what, then, is the word to describe a motion picture that pigeonholes goth girls as ill-bred, switchblade-wielding sluts? (Ryan and the intrinsically annoying actress Busy Philipps win fans from the hysterical right in the process.) In the latter half of the featurette, Ryan and Erika Christensen (who upstages Home Room--and provides its only moments of suture) travel to Littleton with the film in tow, where they are sainted post-screening by a cluster of three or four students who stuck around for an autograph, and the subtext of the piece becomes how sickening Bowling for Columbine and Elephant (neither of which is mentioned by name) are, given that nobody from those pictures knelt at the altar of Columbine like the star of Swimfan did. Home Room itself is subject to muted detail thanks to a combination of the film's bloated running time and the extraneous inclusion of a fullscreen transfer alongside the OAR 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation. Shame, since the image otherwise passes muster. The Dolby Surround soundmix is unexceptional and even clipped in the upper registers. Theatrical and video trailers for Home Room round out the platter.-Bill Chambers

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