DISNEY'S PROM is a fairy tale for kids who lack imagination; a movie about high school that's made for middle schoolers and acted by adults. At Conspicuously Diverse High, it's almost prom time, and not everyone has a date! Some people have dates with the wrong other people! The only way the stakes could be lower is if the entire senior class was wrapped in bubble wrap and given AIDS vaccination shots.

Nova (Aimee Teegarden) is an overachieving senior whose high school experience won't be complete until she's organized the perfect prom. But when her date cancels and disaster befalls her decorations, it looks like her perfect-prom dreams might not come true after all....

Oh, I'm just kidding with you! They totally come true. It so happens her school has a spare long-haired bad boy, heart of gold shining beneath a dirty wifebeater, and it also happens he's good at fixing decorations. When they kiss on the dance floor, it looks like two lesbians making a brave prom statement.

As a diehard teen movie fan who's watched Angus three times since it showed up on Netflix Instant, it's frustrating to see the genre's finest tropes deployed so listlessly. It would be possible to recreate the entirety of Prom from video clips from other, better movies: 10 Things I Hate About You, Can't Hardly Wait, that one movie where Freddie Prinze Jr. convinces a bookish girl to wear makeup. (Literally any teen movie I can think of falls into the "better" category, and yes, I remember Crossroads.) Disney's cynical manipulation of adolescent fantasy comes as no surprise in a post-High School Musical world. The only "surprise" any of this presents, in fact, is the one 11-year-olds weaned on Disney's high school fairy tales are going to feel when freshman year rolls around.