These Girls

These Girls is an adaptation of a play by Vivienne Laxdal that doesn't quite make the leap to the big screen. It's a farce about three teenage girls who each make a play for an older, married man. The movie is set in small-town Canada (presumably), where trailer parks litter the landscape and single digit-I.Q. bikers grow weed in their backyards and bash heads for the hell of it. Glory (former MuchMusic VJ Amanda Walsh) plays a 17-year-old "babysitter" for the child of married dimwit Keith Clark (David Boreanaz), whose wife works the graveyard shift at a hospital. One night, Glory's close buddies, Keira (Caroline Dhavernas) and Lisa (Holly Lewis), tiptoe into Keith's backyard to steal some of his marijuana plants, but discover Glory in bed with Keith. This inspires Keira (the smart one) to sexually blackmail Keith, which in turn provokes the born-again Lisa (the holy one) to coerce Keith into deflowering her. Glory (the middle-class princess of the trio) hits the roof with jealous rage when she learns of these betrayals. So, Keira devises the Orton-esque solution of the three of them sharing the hunky husband each week. Unfortunately, These Girls doesn't take more inspiration from Joe Orton, the acid-penned British playwright whose controversial plays (Loot, Entertaining Mr. Sloan) mixed death and danger with sex and made audiences squirm as they laughed. These Girls lacks danger and feels more like a TV romp with cute laughs, but little else. Though the performances all around are good, the characterisations are limited. What exactly does Keira, the narrator, learn from her summer affair? How does she mature, as the film boasts? Moreover, the ending is bloodless, even nice. These Girls is a fun piece of entertainment, but it's also a missed opportunity. (Seville)