The cornerstone of any nineties teen movie worth its salt is the party. Parties thrown by American high schoolers of the decade rival (we imagine) the sort that Jay-Z and Kanye West had the night before they recorded No Church In The Wild. Sunglasses and Advil? After some of the shindigs we've seen in nineties teen movies over the years, you'd need...super-sunglasses. And morphine. That would be the only way to recover from such an epic hangover, to soothe your joints after such hard partying, to deal with the headache caused by the club-quality DJ who for some reason showed up at somebody's house to play banging tunes. You've seen them in every nineties teen film: the parties which occur in the house of a kid whose parents are out of town (and presumably are incredibly rich, since they all live in McMansions, usually with a pool), which involve hundreds of drunken kids, getting involved in all sorts of debauchery, with a proper DJ soundtracking proceedings, huge beer kegs, and organisational skills with the precision of a military operation. It's like they were put together by a professional Californian party planner, not a bunch of high school kids having an improvised get-together at a pal's house. Obviously, we've never been to parties like this. The US does boast bigger houses than we do; but it's also populated by kids ill-equipped to throw a decent party. Especially cos they can't get booze until they're 21. So at best, they're like that one Inbetweeners episode with kids drinking and sitting around in awkward silence whilst the parents wait in the bedroom upstairs. Lies, lies and more lies, psht.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
