...and I'm trying so hard to watch this without turning it off. It sucks so bad already. Thank god Sarah Michelle Gellar took over the role and Kristen Swanson was booted. I can't STAND the fact she gave Buffy a Clueless girl persona. Like WHAT?!
shareBefore Buffy became the slayer that's how she was supposed to be anyway... You see this in one of the later series 2 episodes where Angel is watching her outside her school in L.A.
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That's why it's *BUFFY* the Vampire Slayer, that's the whole conceit.
sharewell the show doesn't follow this origins, so you can't say the show is the countinuation.It just simply isn't.
In Welcome to the Hell Mouth Buffy makes it clear that she burned down the Gym instead of not buring it down. The movie 1992 was rewritten to make it seem more lite and Fluffy. Buffy yes was supposed to be you're Typical Cher out of Clueless. Also The origin "Buffy the vampire the show" Is consider cannon to the series not this movie
http://www.tengaged.com/user/Parawhore
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Well, that would be some trick: Cher Horowitz didn't exist yet!
shareBut that basic character from Clueless was already a very well established stereotype by then.
Listen to the Frank Zappa song "Valley Girl" some time. That's a direct dramatic (well, comic) ancestor of both Buffy and her friends in this movie and Cher and her friends in Clueless.
The interesting thing about this movie is it's so locked in its time -- the early-'90s, now it's dated and lost a lot of appeal. It was interesting, fun, innovative, sometimes scary, when I watched it back in '92/'93; I watched it a couple months ago and thought "I used to like this that much?" CLUELESS, I had the pleasure of watching that back in '95; the "valley girl" image wasn't new (going back into the '80s) BUT was given a very modern sensibility & style. In fact, it puzzles me when people say CLUELESS is dated...REALLY not much has changed stylistically since 1995, though part of it could be relative, as I'm used to watching movies going all the way back to the 1930s...I would suggest to those people watch BUFFY from '92! This movie has '80s-early-'90s written all over it. There are so many movies from the period that hold up better, though. Getting off track but the comedy-drama PARENTHOOD from 1989 (directed by Ron Howard, starring Steve Martin and many others), for example, doesn't look dated AT ALL (ahead of its time?); and more relevant to this thread, a vampire movie from 1985 that feels and looks dated (except f/x) but holds up well in spite of that, is FRIGHT NIGHT, in part because of its still impressive, convincing special effects, and a witty script that balanced humor, mystery, suspense, and raw horror. Thank you for listening to my rambling.
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Movies from the Reagan/Bush era look dated, I think, because they were TRYING to make them look dated. (Seriously, just watch some parts of the Arnold Schwarzenegger flick THE RUNNING MAN [1987] and try to tell anyone with a straight face that the filmmakers sincerely believed what they were making to be a "vision of the future.") That era, you see, marked the ascension of the Baby Boomers to the upper ranks of studio production, and I think they wanted to make movies that looked nothing like anything ever seen before.
Just look at movies from the '70s in comparison. Quite a few of them - THE GODFATHER and APOCALYPSE NOW, to give just two examples - hold up pretty well today. (Of course, they were both period pieces, but that's no guarantee that they won't muck them up.) By comparison, so many '80s movies are embarrassing - even bizarre - to look at today because there was so much conscious effort to make them "cool" and "edgy." Whether it was the gimmicky credits sequences (hot pink and fluorescent white, anyone?), the superfluous special effects and bursts of violence, rock music blasting ALL the time, the shoehorned-in "comic relief" characters, the gratuitous slapstick humor, name-brands and cultural touchstones dropped up the yin-yang, or one of the characters (Ferris Bueller, for example) speaking with a permanent sneer, all those movies seem to be saying: "We're more hip and original and above it all than you could ever be." (In fact, one reviewer on this site has suggested that there always seemed to be something off-kilter (insane?) about the sensibilities of these movies - too cutting-edge for their own good, and headed for a fiery crash.
The genius of the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER movie, I think, is that they deliberately played up the '80s aesthetic BUT put all that alongside the tropes and overall atmosphere of a traditional horror film, thus making it clear that the filmmakers were aware of how ridiculous they looked and were poking fun at themselves. Definitely more successfully done than, say, BEETLEJUICE, which tried basically the same approach and failed.
Yes, because watching an anorexic girl with no fighting skills is a huge upgrade. Maybe a teen soap opera was what Joss intended, but after having seen the movie and then watching the show the show was the disappointment.
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