"Great, my secret weapon is PMS. That's just terrific. Thanks for telling me!"
So back when I was a kid I actually enjoyed this movie. I was only 8 years old when this movie came out. 5 years later a TV series based on the movie premiered and I avoided it like the plague! 5 years after THAT, I caved in and watched it and loved it! The TV series was very well done, it was dark with a hint of comedy but it was much more serious than the 1992 film. After having seen the film again recently I realized how absolutely awful the film really is.
The movie plays out very much like the pilot of the TV series played out. It's about a girl, Buffy Summers, the popular cheerleader who is "the chosen one", the slayer. She is contacted by her watcher, who goes by a different name in the film than the TV series, played by Donald Sutherland. He shows her how to prefect the art and become the slayer. Not much more to it than that.
This movie is poorly put together, there's no time between scenes it immediately jumps from the last line of one scene to the first line of the next scene. Buffy is made out to be an empty headed "OMG" teenage girl who is, for lack of a better word, stupid. I believe this was their attempt to capture that "Clueless" like girl (I am aware that "Clueless" came out 3 years after this film, but I couldn't think of a better way to explain it). On the TV series Buffy was a former cheerleader and a carefree girl, but never was she really portrayed as stupid as she is in the film. To prove how stupid they really make her, at one point in the movie someone asks her what's wrong with the environment, her response is to get rid of the ozone layer. Really? I mean even the dumbest people in the world aren't THAT stupid! But the problem is that she is presented as stupid but when she meets up with her watcher she all of a sudden she becomes someone who cares about other people and apparently meeting him has raised her I.Q. as well.
The TV series is so much more well done, it's an intelligent series done the way creator/writer Joss Whedon wanted the movie done. The cast is better and Sarah Michelle Gellar is much more likable than Kristy Swanson. This movie is so lost it can't be found again. After seeing the TV series, this movie could have been so much better if they had just let Whedon do what he wanted to do.
