Cruel Intentions

Part of The Loft Cinema’s summer series, 1999! BEST. MOVIE. YEAR. EVER.

When it comes to ’90s teen movies, none are more sinfully delicious than Cruel Intentions. In this modern-day, sexed-up teen update of Les Liaisons Dangereuses, dark comedy collides with wicked melodrama as its two evil “heroes,” ultra-wealthy, unscrupulous step-siblings Kathryn (Sarah Michelle Gellar, chewing the scenery in divinely devilish fashion) and Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe, in full-on “hipster Eurotrash stud” mode), blithely ruin lives and reputations with hearts as black as coal. Kathryn wants revenge on a boyfriend who dumped her, so she befriends his new intended, the gawky Cecile (Selma Blair), and gets the insatiable Sebastian to deflower the innocent virgin. The main event, though, lies in Sebastian’s seduction of good girl Annette (Reese Witherspoon), who’s written a nationally published essay entitled, “Why I Choose to Wait.” If he fails, Kathryn gets his precious vintage convertible; if he wins, he gets to bed Kathryn. The stakes are high, and the games are indeed dangerous, but will Sebastian make the fatal mistake of falling in love with Annette?  Filled with campy excess (just try to forget the sight of Buffy the Vampire Slayer snorting cocaine off a crucifix), lurid titillation (flashback to a time when two girls kissing on screen was utterly scandalous) and a playlist of hot ‘90s tunes (Fatboy Slim, anyone?), Cruel Intentions delivers a sleazed-up, wickedly good time that practically wallows in the kind of wanton adolescence that only exists in the movies. (Dir. by Roger Kumble, 1999, USA, 97 mins., Rated R)