David Boreanaz

These Girls

Starring David Boreanaz, Caroline Dhavernas, Holly Lewis, Amanda Walsh. Written and directed by John Hazlett. 92 minutes. At major theatres. 14A

These Girls takes place mostly in the vicinity of a coastal trailer park, and the setting is perfect for this funny and gleefully unsentimental, low-budget tale of unbridled female teenage lust. We’re on the frontier here, even if it is on the edge of morality.

Based on a play by Vivienne Laxdal, the movie tells the story of the summer in the lives of three precociously smart but dangerously idle friends - Keira, the cynical one (Caroline Dhavernas); Lisa, the romantically deluded one (Holly Lewis); and Glory (Amanda Walsh), the horny but religiously inclined one - during which they decide to more or less blackmail a hunky older married pothead (David Boreanaz) into having sex with all of them on alternating babysitting nights. Correct me if I misspeak here, but I do not remember seeing this plot in any recent Hilary Duff movie.

A former collaborator with the Canadian director Gary Burns (The Suburbanators, waydowntown), Hazlett demonstrates something of his ex-partner’s easy way with casually nonconforming, what-the-hell teenage behaviour: The girls doing the conniving in this movie are never characterized as manipulative, shrewish, mean or in need of redemptive intervention (indeed, Glory’s motivation for getting laid, like now, is because she’s weeks away from committing herself to God). They just see something they want, know how to get, and go for it.

Instead of making judgments - bad for any comedy - the movie delights in the take-charge, high-spirited intelligence of these hormonally driven small-town kids, and establishes a world wherein the balance of power is firmly on their side. The movie’s men, from the dim-witted local kid who invites them to "come to the dock and watch me float" to Boreanaz’s studly, homebound pushover Keith Clark, are uniformly presented as purely momentary diversions on the road that leads directly out of town. Which is exactly where they go: In the movie’s opening scene, narrator Keira is already giving her new university professor a hungry once-over.

Kept bubbling by a sensational all-girl power pop soundtrack, These Girls is fun precisely because it allows its characters to have theirs. Although the movie feels occasionally constricted by budgetary limitations and theatrical origins, Hazlett nevertheless coaxes delightfully confident yet emotionally grounded performances out of each of his three conspirators, and Angel and Buffy’s Boreanaz, as the overwhelmed victim of all this unwholesome attention, is an endearingly helpless love object. Compared to these girls, vampires are easy.