Mean Girls (NC16)

112 minutes, opens on Feb 22
3 stars

The story: The Plastics is an elite clique of fake and shiny high-school girls ruled by conniving queen bee Regina George (Renee Rapp), who takes in naive new student Cady Heron (Angourie Rice) to groom her. But then, Cady makes an enemy of Regina by crushing on her ex (Christopher Briney).

American comedy Mean Girls is an adaptation of a 2017 Broadway musical based on the 2004 hit movie of the same name that stands as an essential adolescent text.

The dead-on high-school satire, based in turn on comedienne-actress Tina Fey’s adaptation of the 2002 Rosalind Wiseman book Queen Bees And Wannabes, launched catchphrases (“That’s so fetch”) and Mean Girls Day (Oct 3), not forgetting the careers of Rachel McAdams and Lindsay Lohan in their respective roles of Regina and Cady.

Regina’s minions Gretchen (Bebe Wood) and Karen (Avantika) are the other Plastics of North Shore High, where Fey and Tim Meadows reprise their teacher duties from the original film.

Cady has a flamboyant gay (Jaquel Spivey) and a Goth misfit (Auli’i Cravalho) for her own allies as the sweet-faced mathlete turns vixen in a war with Regina to win over the boy.

The story is the same, even if the promising young cast must now sing and dance through unmemorable numbers composed by Fey’s husband Jeff Richmond on their way to learn self-acceptance.

But it no longer draws blood. The world in the two decades since Fey’s screenplay has become meaner than the mean girls with their social hierarchies.

Directing couple Samantha Jayne and Arturo Perez Jr’s feature debut is upbeat entertainment that incorporates TikTok and smartphones without accounting for how teenage girlhood has changed in the era of social media.

Hot take: Time has declawed the wicked teen divas such that their comedy remake is spunky but tame.

The Forbidden Play (NC16)

111 minutes, opens on Feb 22
3 stars

The story: A boy (Minato Shogaki), after losing his mother Miyuki (First Summer Uika) in a car accident, buries her finger in the backyard and chants over it every day for her return. Woe betide the living when she is reincarnated.

J-horror pioneer Hideo Nakata can never create another Ringu (1998) – that genre-defining smash was a singular phenomenon. The Forbidden Play is nonetheless the director’s most meaningful work since Dark Water (2002).

This adaptation of a 2019 novel of the same title by Karuma Shimizu is American writer Stephen King’s Pet Sematary (1983) if the dead pet cat were mummy.

Bit by bit, body part by body part, Miyuki pushes through the earth to crawl fully back to life. It is a chilling sight.

She grows her monstrous strength as much from her son’s incantations as her vendetta against Hiroko (Kanna Hashimoto), a winsome online reporter who was her husband’s (Daiki Shigeoka) co-worker and had a crush on him.

She is no ghost because ghosts do not exist, explains a shaman (Shinobu Hasegawa). Rather, the evil wraith is a living manifestation of vengeful jealousy that can be defeated only by “obliterating her resurrected body”.

The mysterious otherworldly phone calls and demonic possessions tormenting Hiroko are generic scares, but this supernatural yarn is disturbing in examining the undying power of grief (the son’s) and hate (Miyuki’s).

Hot take: Nakata returns with an effective tale of the living dead driven by human emotions.