By Robert Scucci
| Published
I love a solid comedy thriller, and the darker they get, the more I’m drawn to them. My favorite film that nobody ever talks about is 1998’s Very Bad Things, which, to me, is absolute perfection thanks to Christian Slater’s insane commitment to the bit. The movie works so well because his character is a totally deplorable excuse of a human being, but his friends, who actually have a conscience (kind of), try to bring him back to reality when they’ve had enough of his sadistic machinations. That sense of balance as the body count continues to climb is what makes the film such a wild ride.
Cut from a similar cloth, but not nearly as redeemable, is 1999’s Teaching Mrs. Tingle, which boasts a similar character dynamic, except for one minor detail: you don’t really want to root for anybody here. In Very Bad Things, a very bad situation spirals out of control, and we watch our protagonists wrestle with their sense of morality. In Teaching Mrs. Tingle, everybody sucks, and it’s impossible to pick a side, which makes the entire ordeal exhausting. That also explains why the former title borders on cult classic status, while nobody cares about the latter.
Everybody Sucks Here
Teaching Mrs. Tingle follows Leigh Ann Watson (Katie Holmes), an overachieving high school senior who desperately wants to become valedictorian so she can earn a scholarship and finally get out of her hometown. Standing in her way is Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren), her history teacher and a runt with a capital C who seems to take genuine pleasure in making her students, professional peers, and everybody else she interacts with, miserable.
Despite apparently doing pretty well for herself, judging by the size of her house, Tingle is a bitter and vindictive woman, particularly interested in making sure Leigh Ann doesn’t get what she wants. Things finally boil over when classmate Luke (Barry Watson) steals a copy of Tingle’s final exam, slips it into Leigh Ann’s backpack, and gets her accused of cheating.
Leigh Ann, Luke, and her best friend Jo Lynn (Marisa Coughlan) head to Tingle’s house that night hoping they can reason with her, which goes about as well as you’d expect. A confrontation involving a loaded crossbow ends with Tingle unconscious and the three students making the perfectly reasonable decision to tie their teacher to her bed rather than call literally anybody. Once Tingle wakes up, the situation turns into a nasty battle of wills as the students scramble to save Leigh Ann’s future while Tingle starts figuring out exactly which insecurities she can exploit to turn them against each other.
The problem is that nobody has much moral high ground to stand on. Tingle is clearly the biggest monster in the room, but Leigh Ann, Luke, and Jo Lynn are selfish, jealous, and increasingly willing to make terrible decisions whenever it benefits them.
Cheaters Always Win
Watching Teaching Mrs. Tingle for the first time since it came out and my older sister rented it with her friends, I really wanted to like this one. I genuinely thought it would play like a PG-13 version of Very Bad Things because the beats are all there. A misunderstanding spirals out of control, and then everybody has to deal with the consequences.
Very Bad Things is well served by its R-rating because some horrific crimes against humanity are being committed and everybody’s navigating the consequences of the fallout in gruesome and hilarious fashion. In this giant steaming turd of a movie, the stakes couldn’t be lower: a girl gets threatened by her teacher, so her friends bring a loaded crossbow to her house. The preposterousness of the entire plot can’t be held up by such unlikeable people because, at the end of the day, these are high school problems that really don’t matter much in the grand scheme of things.
And the moral of the story couldn’t be worse for the film’s original target audience: cheaters always win. Had our “heroes” been a little more likeable, though, this could have been a really fun Parent Trap kind of flick where we follow a group of somewhat sympathetic characters who are way in over their heads. We don’t get that here because everybody is the worst version of the character archetype they’re trying to represent. I’m all for a mean-spirited comedy, but everybody’s so comically cruel it damn well takes you right out of the movie.
I found myself asking the question, “If you had to be stranded on a desert island with any these people, who would you pick?” My answer was immediate and simple: all of them, because I’d have absolutely zero qualms about roasting them over a fire and eating them if it meant I had a shot at survival.
As of this writing, you can stream Teaching Mrs. Tingle for free on Tubi.
TEACHING MRS. TINGLE SCORE
