Film

Bottoms

A gloriously absurd comedy about two unpopular girls who accidentally start a fight club disguised as self-defense. It's crude, anarchic, and wildly inventive—less interested in plot coherence than in riffing on teenage desperation, queer desire, and the chaos of trying to matter. For anyone who loves comedies that swing for the fences.

TMDb rating3.4

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Wet Hot American Summer2001

A comedy that treats teenage chaos and ensemble goofiness as high art. Layered jokes, surreal tangents, and genuine affection for its messy characters make it endlessly rewatchable and genuinely clever.

But The humor is non-stop and scattershot; if you need a strong plot to anchor you, it'll feel exhausting rather than fun.

Wet Hot American Summer poster

Heathers1989

Pitch-black teenage satire that balances horror and comedy while skewering social hierarchies and male violence. Winona Ryder is magnetic, and it invented the template that Bottoms is playing with.

But It's genuinely dark—suicide, murder, and misogyny are the jokes—and that tone won't be for everyone.

Heathers poster

The Craft1996

Four outsider girls find power through forbidden knowledge, with real chemistry between the cast and a anarchic energy that celebrates female friendship. It's campy without being cynical about its characters.

But The third act veers into more conventional horror-movie territory, and some of the effects have dated unevenly.

The Craft poster

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The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Assassination Nation2018

Both are films where female friendship is the engine and male-directed violence is the antagonist; both weaponize surrealism and tone-shifts to avoid feeling like preachy satire.

A visually dazzling, deeply stylized rage-film about four teenage girls targeted by online harassment and male violence. It's surreal and cartoonish but carries genuine anger about misogyny. Makes Bottoms look quaint by comparison.

But It's genuinely chaotic in structure and registers as a scream rather than comedy—some find it cathartic, others exhausting or even exploitative.

Assassination Nation poster
More like this (8)

Mean Girls2004

The gold standard of high school satire: sharp, funny, structurally perfect, and generous to almost everyone in the cast. Tina Fey's script understands teenage social logic deeply.

But It's precisely engineered for mainstream appeal, so if you want something weirder or more unhinged, this will feel a bit safe.

Mean Girls poster

Superbad2007

Two best friends navigating the gap between who they want to be and who they are, with genuine sweetness beneath the crude humor. The central friendship feels real in a way that grounds the comedy.

But It's aggressively heterosexual and, by modern standards, pretty focused on whether the boys will 'score,' which can feel dated.

Superbad poster

Jawbreaker1999

A trashy, unapologetic dark comedy about female friendship and social power. It's visually vibrant, doesn't pretend to care about realism, and has a delirious energy that's genuinely fun.

But It's deeply silly even by comedy standards, and the plot becomes increasingly bonkers in ways that feel unmotivated.

Jawbreaker poster

Lady Bird2017

Greta Gerwig's tender, funny portrait of a complicated mother-daughter relationship and the strange, full interior life of a teenage girl. It finds comedy in specificity and genuine emotion.

But It's a coming-of-age drama that prioritizes feeling over laughs; if you're watching for comedy specifically, the humor is quieter than you might expect.

Lady Bird poster

Under the Silver Lake2018

A surreal, conspiracy-obsessed fever dream set in Los Angeles with references, tangents, and mysteries that spiral deliriously. It has genuine weirdness and commitment to its own logic, even when that logic breaks.

But It's genuinely baffling and refuses to cohere—not for anyone who needs clear answers or straightforward narrative satisfaction.

Under the Silver Lake poster

Booksmart2019

Two overachieving best friends cram a whole night of teenage rebellion into a few hours. Olivia Wilde's direction is playful and kinetic, and the chemistry between the leads is electric.

But The plot is fairly conventional (party movie), and some jokes land more reliably than others. It's also become somewhat ubiquitous in the 'smart teen comedy' conversation.

Booksmart poster

The Baby-Sitters Club2020

Both celebrate female friendship as the beating heart; both let teenage girls be agents of their own stories rather than punchlines. One's chaotic comedy, one's gentle drama, but they're oddly kindred.

A Netflix series about a group of young girls running a business, with genuine warmth, queer characters treated as normal, and visual style that's confident and joyful. It's refreshingly earnest about female friendship and ambition.

But It's aimed at a younger audience and moves at a slower, more grounded pace. There's no irony cushioning the sincerity, which some adults find cloying.

The Baby-Sitters Club poster

Cruising1980

Bottoms is about queer girls claiming space and building community inside heterosexual institutions. Cruising is about gay men's actual community being criminalized and pathologized. Opposite energies, same undercurrent of queer claiming of space.

A provocative, queasy thriller about undercover cop infiltrating the gay leather scene. It's ugly, fascinating, and profoundly weird—a film made for and about gay men that most straight audiences have never heard of.

But It's a serial killer thriller that's genuinely depressing, explicitly sexual, and controversial even within queer communities. Not a crowd-pleaser in any conventional sense.

Cruising poster

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