My Terrorized Teen (2021 TV Movie) User Reviews

VIEWS ON FILM review of First Class Fear

[burlesonjesse5 · 4/10 · 7 October 2022]

A teenager with good grades and a future scholarship on the way, gets tormented by her classmates. Oh and her life is being threatened too. That's the gist of the lukewarm whodunit, First Class Fear.

So yeah, I always get frustrated when almost every character in a movie looks the same. I mean you can't tell who's who. Such is the case with First Class Fear. Maybe it's because almost everyone in "Fear" is female. Maybe it's the fact that they're all wearing private school uniforms. Maybe it's that they all talk the same as if they're guest hosts on The Real. Frustrating.

Anyway, First Class Fear is a Lifetime flick that if it wasn't associated with Lifetime TV, would probably be a sort of Mean Girls on steroids. I mean this is really catty stuff. You got gossiping and rumor spreading and social media destroying oh my! All I got to say is "hiss hiss yowl".

So OK, the actresses in First Class Fear (Liz Fenning, Aria Sirvaitis, Christy Tate) are a tad mediocre despite this catfight infrastructure. I mean they are cast well but come on, how hard is it to feature upstanding girls on screen going to a filthy rich academy. Just tell them to look at the cue cards and let 'er rip I guess.

It also doesn't help that "Fear" is choppily edited with a screenplay that recycles itself to the point of tedium. I mean you can only have so many nasty, teenage brushes and/or mother/daughter quarrels before the writers run out of wiggle room.

All in all, there's a severe lack of suspense here permeated by veteran director Jose Montesinos. Because of his impolitic approach to the material, his use of a less than credible, twist villain, and his failure to sell "Fear" as Lifetime when it could've worked better as satire, his First Class Fear is more like "Coach" fear. Natch.

Music

[evangelista-80912 · 3/10 · 15 October 2023]

Notice these lifetime movies now are continuously playing music or sound effects throughout the whole movie. There is no pause even during the times actors are talking. It is such a distraction. Can be too much for someone that has a hard time focusing. Stop! Sometimes these movies do not need to be as long as they are. They just keep dragging. The older lifetime movies are so much better. They have better actors/actresses. My opinion of course. Lately I tend to just rewatch those because I attempt to watch these new ones and I cannot get past the introduction. They are all starting to look the same but just rearranged. Boring.

Average but...

[haroot_azarian · 3 January 2023]

Overall not a bad average LMN movie. However as I am known to be fussy and attentive to details there are a number of issues in the plot which I would like to highlight.

1 - To me Sophie was being absolutely stupid in not telling her mother everything that the bullies were doing to her.

2 - When in the auditorium Wendy suggests to Grace that after Sophie leaves for college, she was going to take Grace out to meet a man, Grace turns around and says, I already found the love of my life, how do you replace that? Next thing she is drooling all over Tom (Randy Wayne) somewhat openly and unashamedly. I mean WTF? Don't use lines you do not mean! I would have given some stars if it was not for this!

3 - Carolyn only got 2 weeks suspension. I would like to know what her biatch friend Tara got, who was as much if not more involved in the cyber bullying of Sophie as Carolyn was!

A Living Hell

[lavatch · 7/10 · 8 September 2022]

"First Class Fear" (aka, "My Terrorized Teen") conveyed an ominous and sinister sense of a high school with depraved values on display. The name of the Morgan Academy prep school should really be changed to the Dante Academy. For the student Sophie N. Ellis, the experience of school is the rough equivalent of descending into Dante's Inferno.

Sophie is an exceptional student of valedictorian caliber. But she has a nemesis named Carolyn who will stop at nothing to have reversed the school's decision to award Sophie the $250,000 Wilson Scholarship. The stakes are high as Carolyn moves into action to besmirch Sophie's character and even destroy her life.

Carolyn has developed a website appropriately called "Living Hell." It was never made clear in the film why the school principal, Mr. Dugger, and the instructors at Morgan Academy were unable to locate the website and trace it back to Carolyn. Indeed, there were many lapses in logic in the film, as well as cardboard characters, such as the various boyfriends who were nothing more than interchangeable parts.

The strength of the film was in the bonding of Sophie and her mother Grace, who is a teacher at the academy. The compassion of the mother for a daughter who was being bullied was palpable throughout the film.

A sense of poetic justice was at work in the triumph of Sophie in graduating with honors, as well as in the exposing of Carolyn's beloved dad as nothing more than an embezzler. He was supposed to be conducting business in Italy, but it turned out he was sporting a bright orange jumpsuit in a federal penitentiary due to embezzlement. The contrast was stark between the parents of Carolyn and the impact of a decent human being in the mother of Sophie, a truly Amazing Grace.