9/10 - if you love Booksmart as much as I do, you will absolutely adore this new raunchy high school comedy that is much in the same vain but also feels entirely fresh and worthy of much acclaim.

The "plan B," so to speak, to this teenage (or twenty-somethings playing teenagers, rather) buddy-party flick would be a road trip movie, including a bit more partying. We've seen it before: "Superbad" (2007) and "Booksmart" (2019) meets, say, a less depressing "Never Rarely Sometimes Always" (2020),or even the stoners-instead-of-teenagers "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle" (2004),except instead of the buddies hitting the road in search of a laxative in the shape of tiny fast-food burgers, they're after the morning-after pill. The joke being, I guess, that the obvious answer of a pharmacy was staring them in the face all along. Kids, huh, making the simplest tasks into life-affirming adventures. To their credit, these ones do try a pharmacy first, but are unwilling to discuss sex with their parents so as to get an obstinate clerk--I mean pharmacist--to fork over the drug. Or, maybe try another pharmacy.... But, I suppose this is a commentary on particularly American sexual hangups and how contraception gets tied up in the country with abortion, Planned Parenthood and evangelical-political moralizing.

Graciously, "Plan B" isn't as obtuse as it could've been in regards to its obvious socio-political commentary, although there are a few politically-correct or straw-man racial jokes that land with a thud. A fellow student, for instance, who remarks with surprise that one of the girls' homes doesn't smell like curry. Later, there's the tired trope of rapacious men cornering them, and they also employ food-based racism, as well as misogyny. During one of the parties, too, one of the girls quips about how something must be how white privilege feels. Fortunately, most of the comedy is better than that. There's even some relatively-graphic humor involving what I assume was a prosthetic penis. Good, because these type of movies are insufferable if they're rated anything less than the MPAA's R, or the TV-slash-streaming-on-Hulu equivalent of TV-MA.

Compared to that other girl-buddy flick "Booksmart," "Plan B" isn't quite as well filmed. None of the drug-induced fantasy sequences. The musical cues and underwater cinematography in the party scenes regarding the lesbian friend in that one is more impressive filmmaking than anything seen here. A similar plotline is included here, too, but it doesn't quite fit as well into the general theme of sexual repression as I assume it was intended to. It's derivative otherwise, as well. On the other hand, at least the kids in this one don't appear to be condescending rich brats as in "Booksmart." So, there's that, and it's passably amusing.

Also, there's a good joke from Andy the drug dealer regarding his also supposedly being 17, but his skin being affected by his lack of water. Of course, the actor being really closer to 30 than 17.

Sure, a lot of this movie feels like Booksmart, which was the female-centric Superbad, but that's a very superficial review, as both movies are about the relationship between two girls as they grow up in their last year of high school. And much how all of us are different people despite surface similarities, this film can stand on its own.

After co-writing and directing Language Lessons this year, Natalie Morales directed this film from a script by Prathi Srinivasan and Joshua Levy that is unafraid to be sentimental and wildly inappropriate, often at the same time.

Lupe and Sunny are high school girls planning out their first party and hoping Sunny's first crush will attend. The hijinks that ensue -- an unplanned sexual encounter leads to a stuck condom and a trip to get a Plan B prescription in case Sunny is pregnant -- lead to a road trip movie that obviously will change both girls' lives.

That road trip has to happen because their South Dakota town has a pharmacist (Jay Chandrasekhar from Super Troopers, always a welcome sight) who invokes that state's conscience clause, which allows him to not have to give the young girls the contraceptive.

He's just one of the great cameos in this movie, which also has Rachel Dratch in a really wonderful scene as a health teacher not ready for how smart her students are and how bad the used car as abstinence metaphor she's been given to teach is.

The best teen movies leave us wishing that we could spend more time with their characters. I can honestly say that I'd love to see where else Lupe and Sunny's lives will go. There were more uproarious and moments of genuine feeling in this than anything else I've seen in years. It's not for everyone -- it certainly does not shy away from frank sexual discussion nor actual male genitalia -- but for those with an open mind and a love of ribald humor, it's a winner.