Le lycée des secrets

There are too many cliches now in most recent lifetime thrillers. A new girl moves into a new town and starts a new school. Always the main character has a deceased parent. And their surviving parent has such a busy job that they end up going away on business, leaving the teenager alone for a while. More cliche stuff is the change of expectations that make one wonder why it doesn't make much sense. Another typical thing they do in lifetime movies is the killer makes a cup of tea laced with poison! OMG I counted many of these.

It's Autumn (actress Kayla Wallace from the show "The Good Doctor"), who is amazing in this LIFETIME movie and a great actress. She's definitely attractive, but as she goes undercover as a cheerleader in a highschool to do an exposé on the cruel culture of the squad for her school newspaper, someone is viciously attacking the other cheerleaders and Autumn begins to fear for her own life. My thoughts on this story is it is like the Stephen King movie Carrie and Get It On. It isn't really known who might be the villain in this movie, since there are several girls who could be the killer, but maybe the principal or maybe the Cheerleader Captain? It's a regular plotline with LIFETIME where you think you've figured it out and at the end you're like "What the....?" I loved the interaction between Autumn and Kara, especially with Jordan, her boyfriend. Maybe he's the killer? In this movie right from the get go, you're already Horatio Caine from CSI and Nancy Drew combined, but GOOD LUCK on that, because you won't know who the killer is until.... watch the film and it gets a low mark because it's a very confusing mess and until Autumn discovered something, THEN you figure it all out and quite sad, really....

My love for mysteries made me sit through the whole thing. The acting was ok as Lifetime movies go but lacked any known teen TV actors they usually have. The actors made the best of a badly written story with far too many "who says that?" moments.

Here are my thoughts. Plotwise, it took forever to get something to actually happen. Unlike normal Lifetime movies, the first half hour was closer to Romy and Michele, or Harry Potter, or Nancy Drew, or something like that. The plot synopsis sounded much better than the actual movie. Some scenes had descent acting, other scenes...uh-uh. Such as the pointless pizza scene with the mom. In fact, every scene with the mom hurt. The party scene seemed endless. Typical useless police. On the plus side, the cinematography and music were pretty good.

A shallow soap opera for a targeted teenage high school audience. The kids want to pull a fast one on the absentee mom and similar to the old Disney story line, trouble ensues. Is this a mystery worth solving? Not at all, unless you are a paid babysitter to a bunch of spoiled brats.

I give it a boring 4 out of 10 IMDB rating.