You are not expected to accompany your children (though the extra box-office of full family attendance is most welcome), and you are not expected to understand. But US youth cinema - like a bedroom full of dirty laundry, stashed porn and half-smoked joints - is approaching critical mass. And none of us can be expected to ignore it any longer.
Like pornography and martial arts films, American teenage cinema is in a world of its own, with its own stars, its own audience and, to a degree, its own language. Like most teenagers, the new teen movies are microcosmic, self-sustained, repulsive and confusing to adults. Which is just the way kids want it.
And they clearly want plenty of it. Last month, Freddie Prinze Jnr signalled a fresh outslaught of college dramas when he popped up pouting on billboards for Down To You, "a new comedy about giving first love a second chance". Next up is Drive Me Crazy. All you need to know about this one is that Britney Spears supplies the theme tune and Melissa Joan Hart stars as a high-school cutie looking for a suitable prom date (the guy in question is improbably called Chase).
How did it come to this? To any sane outsider, a film like last year's She's All That (which grossed $30million in its first two weeks) is as mysterious and irrelevant as conversational Latin. For the first five minutes of this film I was as "lost" as one can be in something so penetrable. Do you know what a "bobo" is? I don't. It was a relief when someone said "spaz". So we are excluded, and rightly so.
But there are darker forces at work here. Unlike other genres, the US youth market is exerting an ever-wider influence on the rest of the entertainment world. And sooner or later that means you, no matter where you hide yourself.
Backed by similar pubescent trends in music, teen flicks have become in effect a Trojan genre. Innocent enough on the outside but in truth a stealth vehicle for infinite, endless showbiz careers of negotiable merit. As young Hollywood keeps itself in a state of rabid self-detention, it looks like school's in forever. And remember, this isn't Logan's Run - these kids won't just disappear into the sky, they expect jobs for life. The consequences of that for the rest of the entertainment world scarcely bear thinking about. At the risk of sounding like Buffy The Young Talent Slayer, I tell you it's happening already: they walk among us, they're here.
The spawning ground for all of this is US television, which (like cinema in the summer) makes the successful assumption that its young audience are more than happy to spend their out-of-school hours watching drama set in and around the classroom. Except here your school is full of vampires (Buffy and Angel), or everyone's an alien (Roswell High). When the reality for many American students is that their schools are bristling with armed nerds listening to dreadful music, these shows must seem like light-hearted escapism. Each season, Dawson's Creek (the Oxbridge of this pubescent nether world - select intake leads to bright future) floods into a river of teen flick talent.
When not feeding directly from its TV peers (last year's The Faculty took up the still-warm "my classmate's an alien" baton), new teen cinema generally mines the timeless seam of perennial teen issues (sex, identity and above all popularity). While the potential problems of an education system that appears to value social status over academic achievement and then allows its students access to automatic weapons are tragically self-evident, new teen cinema seems unable to confront its demons without dressing them up as vampires.
Whereas at one time the genre at least foreshadowed reality (Heathers, Basketball Diaries, etc), the latest films seem happy to venerate the culture of youth for youth's sake more willingly than at any time since the 50s.
At the high end of the market, films like Scream (now into its second sequel), I Know What You Did Last Summer and Wild Things appeal to a young-ish audience but employ established directors like Wes Craven and female leads (Denise Richards, Courteney Cox) who are unmistakably over the age of consent. And they aren't rooted in the American school system. The real worries are the She's All Thats, Girls, and 10 Things I Hate About Yous of this world. Unlike, say, Rebel Without A Cause, these films are using actual teenagers to play teenagers. And since teenagers don't stay teenagers for long, teen Hollywood becomes self-devouring. Like one of its own villains, craving more young flesh to keeps its ageing features clean.
It is also a world that thrives on being self-referential. Last year's Girl billed itself as "a fab mix of Clueless and She's All That". Promotional material for these films tends to follow similar lines. Krays-era David Bailey-style shots of boy and girl on every poster both pose and answer the same inevitable question, chiefly - will they ever kill the vampires and find love?
And as the scene absorbs classic literature (Pygmalion and Cyrano De Bergerac in She's All That and Whatever It Takes, respectively), it has also created its own cliches. Enter the effortlessly irritating teen Zelig, Freddie Prinze Jnr, who has somehow prolonged the onset of manhood long enough to star in I Know What You Did Last Summer, She's All That and Down To You.
Likewise, the fame offered by these pictures is of a singularly incandescent kind. American Pie (whilst pitching for a slightly older audience by following in the ignoble tradition of Porky's et al) none the less functioned as a star vehicle for its young cast. "People recognise me wherever I go!" squeaked Tara Reid after the film's release. "It took literally a weekend to get famous." Chris Klein is allegedly set to play Jonathan E in a remake of Rollerball (note - James Caan was never in Lassie).
Inevitably this summer's sure-fire hit, high school premonition air-crash shocker Final Destination, will unleash a fresh tide of young "actors" upon a saturated world. And what then? Surely, the younger they start the harder they fall. Rehab will never hold them all.
The ranks of young Hollywood are swelling: boys called Harmony, girls called Clea. Children with faces and names so unlikely they can only have been spawned by other actors.
Meanwhile, the anxious, procreative subtext of the films remains the same. Have sex before the vampires come, the plane crashes, someone wanks into your food or you're too unpopular. So when will this (primarily white and middle class) tide of unreality end? Somehow, the whole genre must be sent up to its room to think about what it has done. If not, we could end up supporting this tide of wasted youth the rest of our viewing lives, and that wouldn't do anyone any good.
Drive Me Crazy is out on Friday
Down To You is out now
