I had not heard of this movie until friends suggested it for my list of movies to watch. They especially pointed out the amazing rap moment and that’s really all I knew that I could not infer from the title.

• This movie doesn’t waste time getting to the saxophone-heavy music. This is how it should be. I can’t tell you how many movies I watch that make me wait for the sax solo. And sometimes it doesn’t even come! Looking at you, The Godfather.
• We’ve all had that dream where a mystery hunk in a dress shirt with rolled up, short sleeves and Cavariccis slinks towards you in the dark. Why do we have to wake up???
• No matter how good you look and feel, never stand on a ledge in heels. Maybe block heels but not the ones she has on.
• Louise’s little brother eats sheet cake under her bed and reads her diary, actually ripping pages out. He’s clearly a psychopath that deserves whatever magic comes his way.
• Her dad is not creepy. He’s just someone who likes his daughter to wear his favorite color.
• Hot guy from the dream (Brad) rocks a 5.0 Mustang and is dating the popular girl (Randa) living right across the street from Louise. Why do the important people in these movies always live so close to each other? I bet Brad went 300 feet before he had to honk that horn (not a euphemism) for Randa.
• Louise’s best friend (Polly) is excessively frumpy. She has on so many layers, I don’t know how the bike could support the weight. She’s dressed like she’s arriving at Ellis Island from the old country.
• Louise and Polly wear disrespectfully large trench coats most of the time. The kind I would only wear if I was trying to cut weight for a fight. I know Louise will eventually be made over into a hottie but she doesn’t really need to start in a cocoon. In She’s All That, they simply used glasses.
• There’s a trio of rappers that serenade the school. I will call them The Leastie Boys.
• Louise has skipped grades because she’s so smart. I get it now. If I was a younger kid amongst seniors, I’d want to hide myself under as much wool and tweed as possible.
• There’s a particularly horrific scene where the diary page that her brother ripped out is accidentally handed in with her homework and the teacher reads the whole thing to the class. Between the brother, the dad, and this awful teacher, I’m not going to be surprised if there’s a clown in the sewers.
• The girls’ gym uniform is.a purple leotard and that’s it. No shorts. No trench coat.
• The popular girls spontaneously break into a song called “I Like Boys.” Is this a musical? She’s introducing them all to this song and they are choreographing it on the spot beautifully. I guess if you feel confident enough in that leotard, you can do anything.
• It appears that the leotards are stuck to their bodies. They don’t ever take them off. They have clearly showered because they are drying their hair while still in the gym leotards.
• Brad works out shirtless on the football field. He throws a football twice at a tire and never misses. They cut from the throw to the same shot of the ball traveling through the tire. “There’s no time to throw two balls through a tire! Use the same clip! We have six more hours of leotard footage to shoot!”
• Quick question: If you were doing an audition for a play and your scene was a kissing one with the girl whose diary about being into you was read out loud in front of you, would you have any awkwardness in the audition? Brad doesn’t. Nothing weird about this. Does he have the memory of a goldfish?
• Brad, too aroused by teenage hanky panky, almost runs over Louise on her bike. He stops the car and tries to help her by offering a ride home. Is Brad a misunderstood jock hunk? Randa makes him leave but he was really concerned. What a sweet goldfish man.
• With a broken bike and no cell phones, Louise is forced to seek the help of the nearby fortune teller. The fortune teller (Madame Serena) doesn’t let her use the phone and basically robs her of the last cash she has on her.
• Madame Serena notices something odd during her palm reading and asks her name again. When Louise says “Miller,” Madame Serena realizes she is a witch with powers that will come to fruition on her 16th birthday. We later learn that Madame Serena and Louise go back 100s of years with witch souls (or whatever). If you had a spiritual connection with someone named “Miller,” I think you wouldn’t miss it the first time. Maybe she should look into getting a third ear instead of a third eye.
• We learn that Goldfish Brad can Fonzie a Coke out of a machine. The impressive part about this is that Cokes were only 60 cents. I want to go to there.
• Louise turns 16 while her brother dry humps the table in excitement for birthday cake. Feel free to watch it. There’s other way to describe it.
• Randa asks Louise if she’d like to go on a date with her cousin from out of town. This is definitely going to work out.
• The cousin is an insane nerd who is acting as if he only has one night to live. He asks her if she wants to smoke weed at one point. Then once he’s all drugged up, he tries to get some loving in the car on the way home. It’s cringe-y. Thankfully Louise is gaining powers and makes him literally disappear.
• Louise turns her brother into a dog. As if I didn’t hate him enough already, now he’s a talking animal. (See Hocus Pocus)
• Madame Serena gives Louise a book of spells. She uses a spell to make the popular girls tell each other the truth. It starts off with calm “you’re not a good singer” insults but gets real, super fast. One points out the other’s “alkie mother.”

Originally posted by buffysummers

• Louise wants to make Brad love her and it appears that the secret to casting a good spell is cayenne pepper or maybe paprika.
• Brad comes over Louise’s house to work on his English paper. Louise apparently removes the hundreds of chairs from her room so they’d have to sit on the bed. How many chairs does a teenage girl typically have in her room? It’s certainly enough for each family member to barge in and immediately notice them all missing.
• Louise thinks better of forcing Brad to like her and gets all the chairs out of her closet. She’s a good person deep down.
• The awful teacher is back and this time, goes through Louise’s bag and shows her birth control pills to the class. How does this teacher, even in the 80s, have a job?
• Louise rightfully gets revenge. She makes a voodoo doll of the teacher and makes him undress in front of the class. The principal catches him right as Louise pulls the dolls underwear down. Somehow he still has a job. Tenure is amazing.
• We finally get to the Rap Off I’ve been hearing so much about. Leader of the Leasties and Polly battle it out for one verse each. Honestly, this could have gone on longer. I know there was magic behind it but Polly’s verse was fire.
• Brad tells Louise that someone like him has to go out with the most popular girl in school no matter how terrible she is. Social expectations are the worst. Instead of convincing Brad that he doesn’t have to be with Randa, it would be easier to cast a spell to make yourself popular. Maybe even insanely popular.
• The chunky knit sweater budget was out of control for this movie
• We have a montage showing us the extent of her popularity. She gets applause when she arrives places. People follow her around. The Leastie Boys rap for her. And her wardrobe consists of so much more denim.
• Brad takes her to a lookout point that they have to climb up to and she’s unfortunately too popular for sensible footwear. It’s hard to climb up a sunflower hill in heels. But you do what you have to do to wear the crown!
• In this abandoned house, they take off some of their six layers of clothing. Then they make out in the dirty house like only the most popular kids in school could.
• Everyone starts dressing and wearing their hair like Louise. Polly gets left out of everything. I don’t know if scenes were cut out (What could possibly be considered “not good enough” for this film?) but we never have the scene where the newly popular girl treats her best friend like garbage and has to apologize. I know Polly misses her but I bet she could just ask Louise to hang out. Anyway, Louise tries to talk to Polly and Polly makes her feel bad.
• Because she is so popular, Louise has to sneak out the back of her house to avoid her adoring classmates. Brad picks her up on a side street and takes her for a drive. They go out on the river to talk as teenagers do. He asks her to the dance. She turns him down because she thinks he’s been tricked him into liking her. She wants it real.
• Louise wants to undo the popularity spell and she talks Madame Serena into coming to the dance with her to help her do it. No one questions bringing a tiny, old woman as your date to the dance. Not even the teachers.
• She wishes the popularity away in the middle of the dance floor. People stop looking at her but Goldfish Brad still feels the pull for regular Louise. He walks slowly towards her. They touch fingertips and roll them up so the palms touch. This happens in a lot of romantic movies. I don’t get it. It’s a good way to train yourself to high five. You learn proper hand alignment. What you want the finish to be. But it’s not romantic. Either way, they kiss and all is good.

This is a fine, late 80s teen movie. It’s essentially a knock-off Sabrina the Teenage Witch. The brother, the nerd date, and the awful teacher were unnecessary. Now that I think about it, the nerd date never reappeared. In most movies you’d have him reappear somewhere embarrassing like under a manure truck that’s about to be dumped. In this movie, he vanishes into nothingness. It’s haunting.

Also, they show that water undoes her spells in the beginning and never return to that either. I was expecting the boat to tip over when she had that moment with Brad on the river. That never happened.

And, finally, she never made up with Polly. Where’s the learned-her-lesson reunion with the best friend, awkwardly hugging through all the layers?

Minus all these loose threads, I enjoyed it. I’d even watch it again if it was on.

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