SWEET SIXTEEN

A LOLITA, AN ARCHAEOLOGIST, AND A NATIVE AMERICAN WALK INTO A BAR...

★☆☆☆☆ (Kill It With Fire)

Director: Jim Sotos

1983

If you’re a Native American or a friend of a Native American or just have common decency, you’ll avoid Sweet Sixteen, a serial killer movie that thinks it’s more open-minded than it is. Our indigenous characters wind up being vindicated, so why am I unhappy? My problem here is the path taken to that point, a maze involving violent white yokels and an archaeological dig that only serves as a vehicle for the spoooky ancient burial ground subplot—and indigenous scapegoating. I haven’t even mentioned the catalyst for all of this nonsense: a hot-to-trot high-schooler’s impending sixteenth birthday. How are the Native Americans and this horny girl all tied together? They’re not. That’s my argument. If you want to get a hot chick naked in a slasher film, be my guest, but why drag in sociopolitical themes? To give your boner film prestige? Come on.

Even if you look at this from an anthropologist’s point of view, with an understanding that finding ignorance in vintage media is unavoidable, you’ll turn it off. The script is a steaming pile of garbage, the girl at the center of the story has no personality outside of budding sexuality, and a few fine actors (playing adults) are condemned to cinema purgatory thanks to nonsensical dialogue.

This is the look I had on my face while watching this film.

The first scene is in a haunted house set designed by someone who frequents Party City. Our fifteen-year old heroine, Melissa (Aleisa Shirley), shivers as she walks around, eying the cartoony skulls, candles, and paintings decorating the shadowy room. As she opens the door, a man with torn skin appears and that’s when real-life Melissa wakes up in bed, a copy of a murder mystery book on her lap. Then we’re transported to another movie, a western, where a bunch of wannabe cowboys at a bar at night call an old Native American man an animal and tell him to leave. Enter the old man’s son Jason, who is willing to defend his father but is blamed by the bartender for starting trouble. Out in the parking lot, Jason’s walking to his car when laughably, out of nowhere (seriously, you’ll never know how she got there), Melissa pops up, and this is when we are transitioned to a new movie: a porno. She tells him she just broke a shoe and could she get a ride? Turns out our heroine is looking for dick and any dick will do. First, she hits up Jason, the poor young man who just had a rattling racist encounter, and after he blows her off, she pouts before approaching two teens in the lot, and one of them takes her up on the offer. Shirley’s acting is so atrocious and monotone, you’ll swear the movie is a prank being played on her.

"I'm going to wish for a better agent."

This is when we find out that Melissa, her mother, and archaeologist father recently moved to town so he could dig up a Native American burial ground. Oh, it doesn’t stop there. After the first few murder victims turn up, Melissa blames the old indigenous man for the crime, and she also lies to the sheriff, telling him Jason accosted her in the parking lot. This is our heroine, folks, and no amount of her smiling and characters saying she’s nice makes you feel anything but the need to put her in a canon and shoot her into the sun.

The characters are pinballs—their personalities change from scene to scene. The sheriff is supposedly the movie’s “nice guy” but then he warns his daughter he’s going to "beat the shit" out of her if she goes out at night; Melissa is a wanton seductress one minute, demure princess the next. And speaking of characters, this is yet another movie that turns Native Americans into Dances with Wolves punching bags in need of a white savior.

I don’t want to waste another minute of my life thinking about this movie. I won’t write about how Jason has an animal skin with crayon drawings on it above his bed or that the sheriff enters homes without warrants or how the movie breaks into song as we watch Melissa eat an apple. I do want to mention that the killer’s identity comes so out of left field, you’ll think you’re watching yet another new film: Ace Ventura: Pet Detective. Finkle is Einhorn! Einhorn is Finkle!

GENRES: Diverse Characters, Serial Killer, Teens in Peril

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