Boosted only by a killer Imperial Teen tune called "Yoo-Hoo" (which Stein deploys twice on the film's soundtrack, perhaps out of desperation), Rose McGowan has to carry this mess by her own bad self. To give credit where credit's due, she is pretty terrific (just as she was in The Doom Generation and Scream). It's only her presence that adds a little zip and vinegar to the dialogue, and justifies the film's one-note production and costume design, which involves dressing Rose's Courtney Shayne and her clique of hotsy-totsy gal pals up in garish outfits meant to illuminate their bitchy glam personas.

Like last year's Very Bad Things, Jawbreaker is set in motion by a good time gone horribly bad, as Courtney inadvertantly offs one of her best friends by abducting her from her bed, stuffing the titular candy in her mouth, and then jamming the poor girl, still in her underwear, into the trunk of a car and driving her to a compulsory pancake breakfast. When the girl winds up dead, a remorseless Courtney hauls her corpse back home, where she sets the whole incident look like a rape/murder.

Doesn't sound like a bad set-up for a grisly comic thriller, a genre I'm always in the mood for, but Jawbreaker is absolutely hollow. Despite an amiable performance from Rebecca Gayheart and an interesting supporting cast (including poor Pam Grier, who apparently couldn't parlay Jackie Brown into much of a renewed career), the dialogue remains as arch on the screen as it must have been on paper. And the ensuing plotline, which has Courtney and pals adopting a geeky schoolgirl as one of their own in order to keep her from spilling the beans about what really happened to Liz Purr, just sends the proceedings looping slowly out of control. The film's only 87 minutes long, and it still feels like a rough cut that needs to be trimmed mercilessly to lose its flab.

Ultimately, Stein turns his back on any real nastiness in favor of some candy-ass moralizing in the final reel. Courtney is finally made the nominal villain of the piece, though her character is no more amoral than her vacuous, utterly complicit counterparts. Demonstrating an absolute lack of filmmaker's intuition, Stein stages Courtney's prom-night comeuppance as a virtual recreation of the prom scene from Brian De Palma's Carrie. This is a dumb decision because, while the corresponding sequence from Carrie built up to an over-the-top climax, Stein's version of the same sequence is the over-the-top climax. It coalesces weirdly for the picture's few, final moments, which are nearly perfect in their own campy, laugh-out-loud ridiculous way. Too bad they have nothing to do with anything else in the movie. For all its posturing, and despite an odd cameo by McGowan's fiance, Marilyn Manson (with a bad moustache), Jawbreaker is missing anything resembling its own sensibility.