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BOTTOMS

"Edgy, Lewd and Violent High School Satire"

Content: -3 Excessive sex, violence, immorality, and/or worldview problems. (Sometimes excessive content such as violence is in otherwise redemptive movies.)
Entertainment Quality:
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Language
Violence
Sex
Nudity

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What You Need To Know:

BOTTOMS is a dark, satirical and sometimes surreal comedy. PJ and Josie are two lesbian “loser” teenage girls who want to lose their virginities. So, they start a female “fight club” to attract and seduce cheerleaders. They also intend the club to be a way for female students to learn self-defense to fight off predatory males in their school. As the girls learn to fight back, the football team gets angry and frustrated they can no longer have their way with the girls. So, they set out to crush the group any way they can.

BOTTOMS is funny and has some surprising twists. The “fight club” scenes are impressively directed, but they are overly violent, with lots of punching and kicking. There’s also a surrealistic, brutal final battle where all the male football players of an opposing team end up dead. BOTTOMS is a frequently offensive, raunchy, pro-homosexual movie. Some positive Christian, moral and conservative content slightly mitigates this negative content. However, BOTTOMS has nearly constant foul language, including many “f” words, and lots of lying and lewd material.

Content:

(PaPaPa, HoHoHo, PCPC, C, B, P, LLL, VVV, SS, NN, D, MMM):

Dominant Worldview and Other Worldview Content/Elements:
Very strong pagan, pro-homosexual worldview with strong politically correct views, but mitigated slightly by some Christian, moral, conservative content, including the two lead lesbian teenagers come to realize their extensive lying has severe consequences and are regretful, one of the girls in the fight club is positively portrayed as a black Republican, “super-Christian” and smarter than everyone else, the lead black female lesbian has a picture of a Black Jesus (respectfully rendered) prominently hanging in her room, and she also talks for an offhand moment about going to church with her family, a heterosexual girl that one of the lesbians tries to seduce stands her ground and says she’s firmly heterosexual and her position is respected, plus after the “fight club” meetings the teenage girls spend much of the time talking about beating up football players who are sexual predators, and in the finale the girls fight off an opposing football team to save their team’s obnoxious quarterback from being killed, and this is portrayed seriously as a change of heart and a sacrifice for their enemy;

Foul Language:
At least 121 obscenities (including at least 74 F words, mostly in a sexual context), one Jesus profanity, one GD profanity, and nine light profanities;

Violence:
Lots of strong and very strong violence with blood includes many close-up shots of girls punching, kicking and throwing each other, with lots of blood splattered or cuts and wounds showing, all played for dark laughs, a giant male violently fights a girl in front of an entire school’s student body at a pep rally and kicks her hard in the head after winning the match (the kick is portrayed seriously), many girls fight many male football players in uniform from an opposing team with punches, kicks, throws, one player gets impaled, and one player’s head explodes after being kicked, all the male players wind up dead, but the scene is played comically, and the entire movie’s violence is played in a surreal not realistic fashion despite its often graphic nature (it plays like an altered form of reality), one teenage girl comically says she hopes she can learn to kill her stepfather (she is portrayed as unhinged, however, and nothing comes of it), another girl talks about bombing the school, but instead she bombs the empty car of a male football player who preys on girls with the bombing portrayed as a surprise but darkly comic, and she sets off another bomb outside a football game after the movie, but no one is hurt;

Sex:
Two teenage girls kiss passionately, as one pulls off her top revealing her bra, and then they lie down on a bed implying sex before camera cuts away, loud moaning is heard while a middle-aged mother and a teenage boy (depicted as 18) have unseen sex, the movie’s entire story is built on two lesbian virgins starting a “fight club” for girls at school in the hopes of seducing female cheerleaders, and there are many crude sexual and homosexual jokes and comments and situations throughout the movie, including two crude references to masturbation and crude references to body parts in a sexual context;

Nudity:
A mural is a takeoff of Michelangelo’s painting of God and Adam so there’s male nudity, teenager appears in a few scenes just wearing a jock strap, and a teenage girl strips down to her bra in an implied lesbian sex scene after kissing another teenage girl passionately;

Alcohol Use:
No alcohol use;

Smoking and/or Drug Use and Abuse:
One minor character smokes some kind of cigar or cigarette in one scene; and,

Miscellaneous Immorality:
The two lead characters lie throughout most of the movie about having been in “juvie” and fought their way through it to survive, their entire plan is built upon deception, as the cheerleaders are not aware the “fight club” is designed to attract them sexually and seduce them, and one of the two lead lesbians bemoans her fear that she will never have sex with a girl since she’s a loser socially and laments her vision of her future as marrying a male pastor and having to endure lying about her sexuality throughout her life.

More Detail:

BOTTOMS is a dark, satirical and sometimes surreal comedy about two lesbian “loser” teenage girls who start a female “fight club” to attract and seduce cheerleaders and lose their virginities. Funny, with some scenes that are superbly directed, BOTTOMS is offensive, raunchy and pro-homosexual, with some positive Christian, moral content that slightly mitigates those negative aspects, but it has nearly constant foul language, lots of lewd material and extreme violence, especially at the end.

The movie’s lead female characters, PJ and Josie, are social losers who are desperate to lose their virginities before college. They realize, however, they have no chance to attract the popular and beautiful football cheerleaders they desire. Having already lied about having been locked up in “juvie” the prior summer and that they learned to fight their way through the summer to survive, they hatch a plan to create a female “fight club” where girls can face off and learn to fight violently in self-defense against the sexually predatory males at their school.

PJ and Josie hope the club will attract the female cheerleaders, whom they hope to seduce through all the grappling they plan to do. Instead, however, a ragtag bunch of other female losers form the core of the club for a while. This leads to some admittedly hilarious characters and comical interactions before cheerleaders start showing up.

The “fight club” scenes are violent, with punching, kicking and throwing in closeups that lead to cuts and broken noses. These scenes are impressively directed by Emma Seligman to come off as darkly funny, in the vein, for example, of all the characters who got slammed by dodgeballs in the Ben Stiller comedy DODGEBALL: AN UNDERDOG STORY.

PJ and Josie enlist their black, male history teacher to be their club sponsor and make the club officially approved. His shocked reactions to their fights also serve up some solid laughs.

As the girls learn to fight back, the school’s football team gets angry and frustrated that they can no longer have their way with the girls. So, they set out to crush the group any way they can.

The plot doesn’t end there, however. It’s best not to specify the twists that occur because they are very surprising. Suffice it to say, however, that PJ and Josie come to realize that their lies about their past have severe social consequences, that the fight club might be getting out of hand, and that they ultimately will have to save their enemies.

BOTTOMS is an unusual movie, in that Co-Writer Rachel Sennott (who plays PJ) and Co-Writer/Director Emma Seligman set up a very inventive alternate reality for the movie’s events. This setup would be horrifying if portrayed in a straightforward and serious way, but it’s made to be undeniably funny, despite what other flaws it may have.

The biggest flaw, from MOVIEGUIDE®’s point of view, is that the movie is targeted to easily influenced teenagers. Thus, BOTTOMS has a corrupt agenda in making teenage homosexuality seem “cool” and heroic. As such, it has nearly constant foul language, many offensive sexual jokes, extreme violence, and lots of lying, in addition to the movie’s strong pro-homosexual attitude.

All this is mitigated somewhat by some positive Christian, moral and conservative content. For example, one of the “fight club” members is a positively portrayed black Republican who’s proudly “super-Christian” and is considered the smartest person in the club. Also, a cheerleader rebuffs PJ’s lesbian advances. She says she’s completely heterosexual, and her position is respected. In addition, Josie, who is herself black, has a picture of a Black Jesus (respectfully rendered) prominently hanging in her room and talks for an offhand moment about going to church with her family. BOTTOMS also has strong messages against lying to make yourself popular, against manipulating people into relationships, about being honest about who you are, plus showing forgiveness and self-sacrifice for one’s enemies.

Overall, however, BOTTOMS is not an acceptable movie for media-wise moviegoers, and it is too off-base morally to recommend as viewing for anyone else. Parents should especially seek to keep their teens and younger children from watching this movie.



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