After an endless prologue mainly there to feature every known highschool clich�, Casey (Elijah Wood at his most annoying), the nerdy weakling who will turn out hero in the end, and Delilah (Jordana Brewster), the bitchy highschool beauty, witness two teachers attacking and killing the school's nurse (Salma Hayek), but when they report this to the police, the nurse is very much alive ... but it seems her mind has been altered, just like almost everyone else's.

Soon Casey and Delilah and four other students who neatly fit every clich� needed for a highschool flick since at least Breakfast Club - the self-proclaimed outcast Stokely (Clea DuVall), the naive and innocent new girl Marybeth (Laura Harris), the football jock Stan (Shawn Hatosy) and the wild boy Zeke (Joch Hartnett) - find out the school is actually overrun by alien parasites determined to take over the town, the USA, the world, and it's in the hands of our sextet to fight them - but the only known weapon is wild boy Zeke's self produced Angel Dust. But first, our youngsters figure they might have a traitor in their midst, so they all have to take the Angel Dust themselves ... and indeed, Delilah turns out to be possessed, but before she goes down, she smashes Zeke's druglab, which leaves our heroes with pretty little supply to fight the aliens ...

For some reason, our gang figures the aliens can be stopped if they kill the alien queen, and thus they think it's only reasonable to propose the queen is the school's principal (Bebe Neuwirth) - while we, the audience, already know they are wrong. So they spend almost all of their Angel Dust on the principal ... but to very little effect (besides the fact that they got rid of their principal). Then they figure the school's football coach (Robert Patrick) must be the queen, but wrong again ... the queen is actually the innocent new girl Marybeth, and she has pretty soon taken over everybody but Casey, upon whom it is now to save teh world - which was pretty much clear right from the beginning.

And wouldn't you know it, in the end he aqctually does save the world, and as a thankyou he gets a now dispossessed Delilah as girlfriend ...

Now there's something I don't understand: With El Mariachi, Desperado and From Dusk 'till Dawn, director Robert Rodriguez made three films loved by fans and critics alike that almost instantly became cult items ... and then he teamed up with the very mediocre screenwriter Kevin Williamson - who was for a time hot stuff after he had written the overrated Scream and the instantly forgettable I Know What You Did Last Summer - to film Williamson's very mediocre highschool-horror script, as if he consciously wanted to damage his reputation. The resulting film is pretty much as weak as the script, it suffers from a serious clich� overload, totally neglects the satirical aspects of the story in favour of routine action and special effects, and is seriuosly hampered by Elijah Wood playing his nerdy weakling tole to the hilt, without any subtlety let alone ideas.

A very forgettable flick, that seems to prove only one thing: While Robert Rodriguez can occasionally be a brilliant director (especially within genre boundaries), he is also terribly uneven and every now and again turns out pure shit.

review � by Mike Haberfelner

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Robots and rats,
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On the same day
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starring
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