The writers/directors of Duck! The Carbine High Massacre warned us this would happen. Bang Bang You’re Dead is just the “‘made for TV’ movie” the opening title card for their little school-centric rampage picture warned us about. Based on the one act play of the same name by Eugene, Oregon resident William Mastrosimone, Bang Bang You’re Dead attempts to combine the maudlin sentimentality of an ABC After School Special (and, in fact, won a Daytime Emmy Award for its apparent success at just that) with a bit of social realism that’s strictly safe-for-cable. The results are pick-n-mixed to an astonishing degree…but I’ll be damned if the film didn’t almost get me.

Thankfully it doesn’t take long for Bang Bang to remind me of its origins. This is, first a foremost, a Showtime Original Picture (suppress your shudders), produced in association with Viacom, the international media octopus which owns Showtime, Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central, and a whole host of other criminal corporations hell-bent on reducing all of us to uncritical “entertainment consumers.” Few things are more insulting than a film with its own Study Guide…save when that film comes to you from the director of The Babysitter (1995) and the people who own MTV. {More}