Perfect High

Perfect High

This movie sure contradicted itself with the word "perfect."

Genre:	Drama
Directed By:	Vanessa Parise
Produced By:	Tina Pehme Kim Roberts
Written By:	Anne-Marie Hess
Starring:	Bella Thorne Israel Broussard Daniela Bobadilla Ross Butler
Cinematography:	Mahlon Todd Williams
Distributed By:	Lifetime
Release Date:	June 27, 2015
Runtime:	85 minutes
Country:	United States Canada
Language:	English

Perfect High is a 2015 drama film produced by Lifetime and starring Bella Thorne, Israel Broussard, Daniela Bobadilla and Ross Butler.

Plot

A young girl, Amanda, befirends Riley after an accident during a pep rally, only to realize Riley and her friends are drug-dealers who trick her into doing drugs.

Why It Sucks

Lifetime is a channel meant for adults like parents. Not for young adults. It's not like some teen would find the channel interesting. However, Lifetime thought differently while allowing this movie to exist. The main characters are teens, the whole message is directed entirely towards teens, everything is about teens! To sum it up, Perfect High was not a good place for Lifetime.
It has good messages, but the execution is wretched. In fact, the portrayal of drug usage is very inaccurate. In this movie, when the characters take drugs, they end up getting a cold. Also, this movie feels like you should still be friends with drug dealers despite, you know, doing drugs!
The characters are absolute idiots.
- There isn't any explanation why Riley and her friends do drugs, other than their dad isn't here.
- Amanda, after spraining her ankle at a party, starts taking pictures of her bruise and posting it online, which caused her to meet Riley. Also, after finding Cameron doing heroin, she goes back on her promise of not doing it anymore and says "going 'cold turkey' was a bad idea therefore we should keep doing it because it'll help me in my audition." This literally led Riley to die because of how selfish Amanda was.
- The parents have the worst character personalities, especially the mother. In fact, she doesn't do anything despite Amanda nearly dying except assume Amanda has a eating disorder and send her to a doctor (which is never fleshed out) as well as eventually finding heroin and sending her to a thearpy. Even then, the aforementioned action is stupid since heroin is illegal and could get you to jail. If anything, the main characters who took heroin should've been arrested!
  - Even worse, the parents don't even ground Robbie, Amanda's brother, for smoking weed! Proof is that after we see him getting lectured, the very next scene shows him on his phone during dinner.
- Amanda's dance teacher nearly kicks her out for doing bad, even though she could've just sent her home and make sure she feels better before audition.
The acting is just abysmal, like a lot of teen movies. The majority of them act so awkward around each other that it feels like a cringefest to sit through considering that the actors act unscripted.
The story is all over the place. It either wants to be a movie tackling anxiety, a movie tackling drugs, or overall, just being yet another generic teen drama movie.
Awful writing. For instance, the scene where Amanda gets injured happens because Amanda trips during a dance and immediately sprains her knee. If Amanda were to trip in real life, nothing would happen. She would be hurt, but not injured. Plus, she was dancing on gym floor, so it couldn't even be possible to do that.
- Another example is when the teens were snorting heroin for a few days, only to suddenly realize that it was heroin. So basically, they were snorting heroin without knowing what it was.
The editing feels like something used straight out of a cheap online video maker.