AFTERSCHOOL is a raw movie, and not in a good way. Unlike ELEPHANT or THE LIFE BEFORE HER EYES or even ACROSS THE UNIVERSE, this offering from Connecticut does a very poor job of building tension toward a cathartic climax. Instead, it allows a promising premise of an underclassman's video class assignment inadvertently capturing a moment of drama on campus to dissipate, petering out through a collage of implausible plot points, poor characterizations, and limp dialog. AFTERSCHOOL is raw as in raw eggs, and who likes those, except ROCKY and other such masochists? Perhaps this movie could be taken as a "morning after" pill; an antidote to the over-sexed, all-powerful Van Wilders and Stiflers of the Wild Bunch school of campus film-making. But with the two main characters a high school sophomore and freshman at a boarding school, what drugs and sexual misbehavior happens here (such as a nonchalant stroll to nearby a campus dale overlooked by upper floor school windows for a muddy consensual double-deflowering in broad daylight) seem beyond the pale for even these pampered yidiots. (Of course, there WAS that related item of Alaskan high school news a while back . . . )
Review of Afterschool
