Lifetime's 'Perfect High' Starring Bella Thorne: The Photo Recap

Drug addiction is not funny. Movies about drug addiction ARE funny, though, especially when they are made by the Lifetime network. That goes double if the movie is also an alarmist look at teen culture and stars a former Disney Channel actress. If last weekend’s A Deadly Adoption proved that Lifetime will occasionally delve into alt-comedy if A-list comedians ask them nicely enough, Perfect High is a reminder that Lifetime has been in the broad comedy game for a while now. Don’t let its flashy, very 2015 social media montages fool you, Perfect High was as old school ridiculous as you’ve come to expect of these movies.

Perfect High stars Bella Thorne as a high school overachiever who excels at hip-hop dancing, selfies, and being naive about the addictive nature of painkillers. If upon hearing the title and premise of this film you predicted that the story would include scenes of escalating drug use, failure to use shampoo, and then finally a best friend dying of a drug overdose, you were exactly right. Everything that happens in Perfect High is exactly as you’d expect, in the exact order you’d expect, and there was something almost comforting about that. Times may change, but unintentionally hilarious movies about drug addiction stay the same. Guys, let’s get High!

Meet Amanda, the lead dancer in some kind of vaguely high school-affiliated dance troupe called the Rhythm Chasers. (Girls, if you have to chase the rhythm you might be doing it wrong.) Although it is never explained why, this dance troupe is considered prestigious, and Amanda’s involvement in it somehow makes her a very popular overachiever. (Sorry, football players and cheerleaders, we all know that dance troupes rule the school.)

Or perhaps it’s just Amanda’s incessant selfie-taking? Honestly, by the end of the movie a very compelling argument could be made that selfies are more insidious than heroin, so this moment was a dark foreshadowing of selfie-related things to come.

Then Amanda’s seemingly perfect life came crashing down when she popped a kneecap during a school rally!

It truly made a disgusting noise and down she went. 

Fortunately, there’s always a silver lining to career-threatening injury:

That’s right, her fellow students were more than willing to fave and RT a gruesome photo of her janky knee. But it was during Amanda’s recuperation when we first meet the movie’s villain…

Prescription painkillers!

See, Amanda wasn’t only fighting off the pain of a knee that resembled the gnarled trunk of a deformed redwood, she was also dealing with the pain of humiliation over having to use crutches!

That’s when her fondness for self-medication really began to blossom.

But then a bad girl with a sense of hearing keen enough to detect the sound of prescription pills being gobbled nearby suddenly came out of the woodwork to bogart some of Amanda’s stash. Her name was Riley, and she was like if Nikki Reed and Lizzy Caplan jumped into a teleportation pod holding hands. She was bad news, basically.

But even more sinister, Riley had a cute brother played by the cute guy from The Bling Ring. It would be Amanda’s greatest temptation yet: The temptation of possibly not dying alone. In other words, she was MORE than happy to go hang out with Carson, even if it meant passing out her pain meds like they were Winterfresh Altoids.

And we all know there’s nothing more fun than running around a living room while high on painkillers and cheap tequila. Except for maybe taking endless selfies of oneself while doing that. Basically the teens were now having maximum fun, deal with it.

But, and here’s the thing about injured knees: When doctors tell you to take a few weeks off and recuperate, that means don’t get high and run around living rooms all night. Because yup, Amanda up and dislocated her knee again! Luckily for her this meant she could get more painkillers.

And this may come as a surprise to anyone who has ever been even slightly high or drunk and attempted to do something with physical precision: Amanda somehow danced better while high? At least at first. She definitely got a little sloppier as her addiction spiraled.

But at least she knew how to have a good time with her friends. That meant occasionally impersonating a zombie on Instagram and also doing drugs.

But the thing about drugs is they run out, and then you have to figure out where to get more drugs from. Luckily Riley was a pro at this. Like, they went to a yard sale and asked the old lady who lived there to use her bathroom.

The next thing we knew…

…they were stealing painkillers from an old lady!! This really bummed me out, guys.

But fortunately for Amanda she got to share her spiraling addiction with Carson from The Bling Ring. I’m not sure it’s a good idea to SnapChat images of yourself eating drugs, but they were in love and who wants to interfere with love?

Just four teens sitting on patio furniture at an outdoor mall, high out of their minds. Ah, suburbia.

But, see, Carson and Amanda’s burgeoning romance wasn’t 100 percent dependent on opiate abuse. One time when he was sober, he came to her house on a Sunday morning and brought her whole family coffee and then kissed her on the sofa. See, even cute junkies can be cute.

Unfortunately all the drugs Amanda had been eating lately had begun to take their toll on her dancing.

Fortunately she had the perfect solution: More drugs!

Unfortunately the perfect solution didn’t end up working very well.

And things got worse when she tried to kick pills and started barfing everywhere. Just barfing right and left, pausing only to check her texts, before barfing more. Withdrawal was NO JOKE, as Amanda was learning the hard way. Luckily she figured out a good way to beat withdrawal: STILL MORE DRUGS.

Then she and Carson got it on. Not sure why that’s important, but this IS a photo recap about teen junkies, and it would be a disservice to overlook this scene of teens doing sex. Parents, please be advised that if your daughters get into drugs they might do sex as well. Which is worse? That is for you to decide.

So then the gang went to a local frat party where everyone was doing so much drugs that even Amanda waved away a hash pipe like it was annoying to even be asked. “Absolutely not.”

But then she saw Carson kissing his ex-girlfriend, and so she ran into the bathroom and smoked the nearest pill!

And she got so high smoking that pill that she walked on the bathtub, fell off of it, and then face-planted on the bathroom counter on her way down. That’s when she woke up in the emergency room with concerned parents demanding answers. As you might imagine, Amanda did NOT tell the truth about what had happened.

She said she drank a lil bit and tripped, and guess what? Her parents applauded her for her honesty. So parents, if you’re watching this movie, NEVER TRUST YOUR TEENS. They say they are sipping O'Doul’s at youth group functions but they are actually in the bathroom smoking Oxycodone. Now you know.

Anyway, the Advil that Amanda had been given to get over her head wound wasn’t doing the trick.

So the next thing we knew she was out scoring more drugs.

But of course Amanda started running out of money to buy more drugs, so it made me laugh when we got to her birthday and (after she Instagrammed her cake) she got so mad at her parents for not giving her cash.

Harsh.

They ended up giving her an old Volvo instead, so she plastered a smile on her face. But then there was a knock at the door and guess who it was?

It was Carson, holding an iPad over his head as an homage to Amanda’s favorite movie, Requiem for a Dream. Also there was a video projection on the garage that said things like “U R Smart,” so she had no choice but to forgive him and take him back. Romantic stuff.

Then came the next phase of Amanda’s addiction: Accepting mysterious baggies of powder from a local drug dealer.

And guess what?

Whatever that mysterious powder was, she LOVED it. Couldn’t get enough of it into her nose fast enough.

She loved it so much she didn’t even care about almost getting in tons of car crashes while high! 

Except then she finally found out what exactly it was she’d been snorting, and it was, you guessed it, HEROIN. She did not take this news well.

Just kidding, she only freaked out for about 12 seconds before going back for another snort.

Then Amanda’s mom, who was super perceptive, decided that something was probably wrong with Amanda. Due to the fact that Amanda had been barfing so much from withdrawal, the mom decided that Amanda had an eating disorder. Which Amanda recognized as an opportunity to get more prescription drugs!

From there she was able to sell her bulimia meds and exchange them for heroin, which did not help her dancing skills one bit.

I loved this girl right here. She started out as a mean girl but by the end she was just 100 percent concerned side-eye. Like, no further comments, your Honor. We can all see what this junkie mess is up to.

So then Amanda was really bummed because nobody wanted her to be the leader of the dance crew anymore.

Luckily Riley had her back.

Unfortunately Riley didn’t always have the best ideas.

Next thing we knew, Amanda was SHOOTING JUNK DIRECTLY INTO HER VEINS. But don’t worry, the editing and music made it seem pretttty fun.

Of course!

Even if the aftermath was slightly annoying. Track marks:

Sleep driving:

Losing focus:

And getting kicked off of the dance team:

Yeah, between all of this, Amanda was not loving life. It was very Hakuna NOT Matata for her these days.

She wasn’t even having fun with her friends anymore, and Riley was stealing money from everybody’s wallets for more smack, and Amanda even started telling off her brother, who had been her biggest ally the whole time. Amanda was in a dark place, and she was due for a wake-up call.

Which happened the next day when they were hanging out in the backseat of a Tahoe.

RILEY OD’d!! 

She just straight up tilted her head back and died right there in the Tahoe.

The teens had gone too far this time.

In my opinion, Amanda was very sad about Riley’s death. 

But even when word began to spread that Riley had not died of a heart attack, but rather of a good old-fashioned heroin overdose, Amanda would not come clean about her addiction. That is, until her brother narc’d her out to her mom by showing her the childhood music box that Amanda had been keeping her heroin in, probably because it was the most ironic form of storage she could find!

That’s when Amanda panicked and grabbed the keys to her Volvo and drove to her drug dealer’s apartment, where she begged for drugs for free.

When the dealer’s shady friend got out his phone and began trying to scare up a paying john, she recoiled. But when Carson ambled into the room and begged her to become a junkie whore, it was the final straw. So yeah, her rock bottom was NOT the fact that her best friend died of a drug overdose in the backseat of a Tahoe, it was that the cute boyfriend chose drugs over her. Cool rock bottom, Perfect High!

So then Amanda finally came clean to her mom: She had a drug problem. Her mom hugged her and then sent her to rehab. The End.

Except, what’s this? A HAPPY ENDING? Yes, you guessed it, Amanda’s addiction to heroin and pills had an upside: Her classmates turned her into a school celebrity!

So please keep in mind that you should only do drugs if you want to laugh with your friends, fall in love with the school hottie, and then later become an object of sympathy to hundreds of your peers. Truly a cautionary tale we should all take to heart.

Friends, I am here to tell you that Perfect High was not very good. It was, however, perfect. Drugs are very stupid though, do not eat them or do them. Thank you in advance!

What lessons did YOU learn from Perfect High?