We Watched It For You: ABC Family's Teen Spirit

Here we go again, you guys: Another day, another terrible piece of television trying to steal tons of your free time. While you were off watching respectable things like Breaking Bad or Teen Choice 2011 (haha j/k), ABC Family was launching a first strike directly into your living room in the hopes of destroying a chunk of your weekend (and some of your sanity). But we here at TV.com consider ourselves your first line of defense—because guess what? WE'LL WATCH IT FOR YOU.

This week's selection contains neither dragons nor Danny Glover, but it DOES take place in a world so steeped in fantasy that it bears almost no relation to anything that has ever happened or people who have ever existed!

ABC Family's Teen Spirit is an unholy hybrid of Mean Girls and She's All That with a generous dose of just about every other teen movie ever made. Plus, I don't know, Ghost Dad? It's kind of hard to count just how many different movies Teen Spirit ripped off, but let's just say it ripped off a gross of movies. A GROSS.

The most notable aspect of the film was that at no point did it make ANY SENSE WHATSOEVER. It's about teenagers in high school, but I'm guessing the writers were home-schooled and are now 80 years old and only gained the vaguest sense of what high school was like by watching other movies about it? Honestly, this thing was just super confusing, lazy, insanely unfunny, and incredibly boring. But it DID feature cast members from Pretty Little Liars, Make It or Break It, and pretty much all other ABC Family shows, in case that's your thing. Or maybe you're just really completionist when it comes to the oeuvre of Chris Zylka? There are worse things to be! Anyway, this movie did have some highlights, is what I'm saying. See if you can spot 'em!

This was the kind of movie that preferred TELLING rather than showing, especially with a voiceover by TIM GUNN. So yeah, "These are the popular girls, etc."

You could tell this was a believable world because the only thing these girls discussed was their own popularity. No wonder they were considered cool! That is the coolest way to be, no diggity dawg.

Then we met a group of "misfits" who Tim Gunn informed us were the least-popular students in the school. Except they made a Claymation web series that was apparently popular amongst the students? See, it was MINUTE TWO and this thing was already confusing.

Here's what the "ugly" chick looked like. You can tell she was ugly because she had braids and also wore plaid. "Kill yourselves, girls." —Teen Spirit.

As obviously genuinely cool as these kids were to normal human beings like you and me, the one thing they needed to work on was the concept of Claymation. For instance, if it's Claymation, you do not actually need to blow things up in real time. You also don't need to use clay that takes on the consistency of strawberry yogurt during said needless explosions.

See what I'm saying? Oh well. Filmmaking!

I bet everyone was eagerly anticipating the installment of Pig Tales in which the pig listens to an iPod and then explodes.

But WHOOPS! There was only so much wall space and in this school all of it was needed by main mean girl Amber and her quest to electioneer herself into the role of Prom Queen. Because what? Posters for prom queen? I may have gone to high school many centuries ago, but I don't recall there being an actual campaign behind the prom queen competition. Oh well. What do I know?

Our hero Lisa was very musically talented, which she demonstrated when she was scoring the Pig Tales episode using her keyboard on the "banjo" setting. Genius!

But then: TROUBLE.

That's right, the mean girls kicked them out of the weird band room (with unattended thousand-dollar instruments) so that they could fill out fake ballots for the prom queen election. Makes tons of sense. Almost TOO MUCH sense, you know?

But then we got a glimpse into Amber's home life:

Amber had it tough, you guys! Sure, she might've lived in a mansion on a yacht harbor, but her mom was like a businesswoman who didn't even respect Amber's popularity! Plus her little sister was all—whatever, not sure. Point is, even clowns cry sometimes, even when they have diamond encrusted hoop earrings.

Lisa had issues of her own, including/especially loving parents who weirdly insisted she wear her mother's old prom dress. Also, she was attending her prom ALONE? Does that happen?

Anyway, so of course Lisa just sat in her car writing her Juiliard essay. Might as well!

The other mean girls were being super secretive about their ballot-stuffing. Honestly, at this point it was clear that nobody in the school gave a damn about the prom queen election. It made Amber seem even sadder.

For some reason that made no sense Amber insisted that her date park on the sidewalk and back his car into a high voltage power converter? So began a ridiculous domino effect right out of the Final Destination films. Because, you know when power shorts out, all of the wires in the vicinity always snap off and thrash about wildly.

I think you can guess what happened next:

So suddenly Amber was in the afterlife and it looked like a nail salon, plus St. Peter was played by a HOMOSEXUAL. Hi, Tim Gunn! Look, I don't hate Tim Gunn or his evidently paltry bank account, but it's hard to describe his participation in this film as anything other than sad. As Nina Garcia would say, I question his taste level.

So Tim Gunn basically told Amber that in order to get into heaven she had to turn the school's least-popular student into the prom queen in one week. Keep in mind he shows her a PHOTO of Lisa, an important fact to keep in mind for later. First off, WHY is the Lord in Heaven suddenly endorsing the merit of high school popularity? Furthermore, why is a perfectly normal and cool girl like Lisa getting dragged into Amber's redemption ordeal? Anyway, this whole scenario was reprehensibly ludicrous, not least because the angels in heaven use glitter-covered iPads to sort out the afterlife.

Anyway, back on earth her school was still dealing with Amber's death. FIRST by rescheduling a makeup prom for the following weekend (OBVIOUSLY), but also by throwing a sparsely attended memorial in the gym:

After everyone burned Amber's reputation for like ten minutes (seriously it was like they were all playing The Dozens in there), Lisa finally looked up from her homework and SAW Amber. So began the creakiest plot device in TV movie history: the ghost you are constantly caught speaking to that nobody else can see!

Next: Who wants a makeover montage??