Like most people, I loved Mean Girls. It was Lindsay Lohan’s golden age. It had the always-wonderful Tina Fey at the top of her game. And it had enough one-liners and pop culture references to become a phenomenon. For all its perfection though, Mean Girls has nothing on Odd Girl Out, the Lifetime Movie Network’s take on the often-absurd world of teenage gossip.
For some background, Lifetime movies hold a special place in our culture for being some of the cheesiest, dumbest and all-around awful pieces of work, like, ever. Chronicling everything from a mother’s desperate attempt to fight her son’s pornography addiction to the real-life scandal involving rebellious cheerleaders giving zero fucks that was incidentally so appalling as to inspire this montage, the film series plays as a weird combination of cautionary tale and the most absurd trash.
The amazing part is that this tenuous combination creates some of the best “so-bad-it’s-good” movies of recent memory, and the good news is that Lifetime keeps churning them out.
With that said, let’s come back to Odd Girl Out. Alexa Vega of Spy Kids fame plays Vanessa, a popular eighth grader who is ostracized due to a love triangle gone awry between herself, her BFF Stacy, and Tony. In my casual stumble upon the film, I assumed that it would be hilariously bad and kept my television on the channel, watching the overacted and melodramatic bullying of Vanessa that included a “Hating Vanessa” website and getting rebuffed at the lunch table.
Out of nowhere, shit got real. Vanessa chopped off all her hair due to some sort of panic attack, and overdosed on her mom’s pills after Stacy gave Vanessa a false address for her birthday party. Yikes. And then, most embarrassingly of all, had a pretty emotional reaction when she finally stood up to Stacy with the help of new friend Emily, with mom Barbara watching from afar going “that’s my girl.” It was heartwarming and deep. It was kind of beautiful.
Lifetime has a pretty solid method to its madness. First, take a slew of B- and mostly C-list celebrities, like Vega (girl's been out of work for years) or Jenna Dewan, star of the original Step Up and Channing Tatum's wife. Even throw in an inexplicable legend once in a while, like when Tatum O'Neal, not necessarily a household name but the youngest person to win an Oscar, played the concerned mom in Fab Five.
Next, take a cautionary tale but make it wildly exploitative through overacting and sheer melodrama. Add in some spot-on feel-good music to harp on the cheese factor. Finally, weave in a relevant message. For all of Odd Girl Out's absurdity, it had an (at the time) progressive no-tolerance stance on cyber bullying and provided an informative caution to bullying's potential hazards. Which is pretty awesome.
So a Lifetime movie can be alternately hilariously bad and, in tonally existing right on the edge of believable reality, rather affecting. And add in a socially conscious message because, like, why not?
Even movies that aren’t as successful as Odd Girl Out – I highly recommend checking out the positively-delirious A Mother’s Nightmare to see a mother’s plight (recurring thing) as her son is seduced by a crazy girl from hell who drugs him with PCP. It manages to be enormously entertaining and puts trashy horror movies to shame. Some are even ripped from the headlines, like Natalee Holloway, about the young woman’s disappearance from Aruba and (again) her mother’s quest to find her. In no other take on the story can you simultaneously become totally absorbed in the agonizing suspense of the case while laughing at its fantastically bad on-screen acting.
Whether you think Lifetime movies are actually kind of good or irredeemably bad, I highly recommend you watch at least one. I guarantee that, at the very least, you’ll be surprised.