Bottoms ( 2023) Film Review.

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My Rating **** Genre – Comedy/Slasher Run Time – 100 minutes Certificate – 18 Country – U.S Awards – 4 wins & 24 nominations So along comes ‘Bottoms’ on Prime Video, a rare original piece of genre skewing comedy mash-up from the mainstream streamer. They tend to play it safe on there with screwball comedies like Shotgun Wedding and action movies with big lugs but this is very different, the sort of thing Judd Apatow used to make, and, indeed, HBO. The brilliant Greta Gerwig changed things up recently with her Woody Allen style intelligent comedies and this more that than Shotgun Wedding, another movie increasingly unearthing the real talent that is Rachael Sennott Sennott is the star of the film but also directed and co-wrote, the way Gerwig does. She has featured in Bodies, Bodies Bodies, Shiva Baby and I Used to be Funny, alongside Bottoms her fourth cool movie talked up by the critics and so one to watch, and at such an early stage of her career. In those four film notable ones she plays gay characters or Jewish characters yet anything but in real life. She is smart in that she can get away with it more in the risky writing with the protection of playing and writing those minority characters in. Again, a lady with talent and intelligence. ===The Plot=== PJ (Rachael Sennott) and Jodie (Ayo Edibiri) are best mates at high school and both gay. They want hot girlfriends to lose their virginity so scheming to meet them. They decide the best way is to start a female emancipating self-defense club, preparing the girls for the general violence to come when their high school plays the big football final against their biggest regional rivals. They hope to get cheerleaders to come along to the club in the hope their schoolgirl crushes, Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and Brittany (Kaia Gerber), are also into chicks and show up. Isabel is dating the high school football captain so may not be the case. With the various geeks, loners and swots joining in the girls are boosted when the hot cheerleaders sign up, the most likely to get unwanted sexual attention from the jocks so ready for some self-defense. After a somewhat bloody start at the fight club the disparate group learns some moves and begin to bond over the weeks as the big match approaches. But will they get the girls? ===Results=== So the fun here is the flip on the perfunctory high school teen comedy romp where it’s the jocks plotting to get the hotties and cheerleaders. Inverting that cliché opens up new lines of humor and jokes to be told about being gay at school, refreshing and welcome in comedy. The lead two girls are fun playing the misfits as they dance around those jock and cheerleader clichés with joyous gusto. It’s funny and well written and the two leads enjoying the freedom of the writing to send up lesbian women in college but not with malice. It’s far from woke, either, the girl’s sexuality often the butt of the joke, the guys woefully two dimensional and dumb. It just has an energy of its own not normally seen in the genre and you chuckle along with the different style of comedy. It’s a comedy for people who like to steer away from the streaming homogeneous mush of teen high-school comedy and with a slice of schlock horror unexpectedly thrown in this will lead you into checking out those other films I mentioned. ===RATINGS=== Imdb.com – 6.7/10.0 (50,234votes) Rottentomatos.com 90% critic’s approval Metacritic – 74% ===Trailer=== https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17527468/