"Bottoms" is a teen sex comedy that might have been dropped on its head somewhere in development. The picture's connection to ancient raunch fests like "Animal House" and the" Porky's" movies is clear, but this rowdy descendant is fearlessly updated — it goes places those old films would never have dared. (The trade-off: "Bottoms" has no nudity.). In the classic versions of these movies, a group of comically individuated young men — a nerd, a lunatic, a clueless hunk, let's say — are yearning to get laid, and eventually succeed in doing so. Here, the desperate sex-seekers are mostly young women, some of them, to make things more interesting, eager lesbians. The result is a fiesta of foul-mouthed gags and truly batty action.

The movie's startling originality isn't entirely surprising. The director is Emma Seligman, whose last picture, the one-of-a-kind "Shiva Baby" (2020), was a complete, out-of-nowhere delight. And her star in that film, the droll neo-ragamuffin Rachel Sennott, stars in this one, too (and also co-wrote the script). Rounding out the movie's creative team is alt-standup and TV demi-star Ayo Edebiri ("The Bear"), Sennott's partner in an earlier Comedy Central series. The chemistry among these three writer-performers keeps the movie crackling along in irresistible high spirits.

The setting is Rockbridge Falls High School, where swaggering football lugs rule the social scene, hall posters convey messages like "You're Prettier When You Smile," and gay losers PJ (Sennott) and Josie (Edebiri), on the verge of heading off to college, despair of ever hooking up with their hot-girl crushes: Josie has her eye on the gazelle-like Isabel (Havana Rose Liu) and PJ longs to score with the knockout Brittany (Kaia Gerber). Josie and PJ are getting desperate ("You wanna be the only virgin at Sarah Lawrence?"), so they decide to start a women's self-defense club — what better way to lay hands on the objects of their desire? They maybe go a little overboard in trying to impress the other women they recruit for the group by claiming to have done hard time in "juvie," where they had to kill another prisoner. Well, almost kill. Or... no, the victim mysteriously came back to life. Whatever.

The two leads get solid support from NFL star Marshawn Lynch, playing the group's slightly confused staff sponsor ("I'm not a fuckin' idiot, I just look like this"); Ruby Cruz ("Willow") as a budding terrorist bomb-maker; and Summer Joy Campbell as a seething mayhem enthusiast in the old John Belushi mold. There are also some surprisingly bloody girl-on-girl training smackdowns, a bizarre pineapple-juice plot, and, when you least expect it, an eruption of mad violence set to the strains of "Total Eclipse of the Heart." Gratifying bonus: The movie also takes aim at academic feminism ("Who is bell hooks and why do we care?") and all-encompassing MeTooism ("OK, who's been raped? Gray-area stuff counts too.")

"Bottoms" recalls any number of past teen-sex "satires," from Heathers to the undervalued lesbian spy caper "D.E.B.S." But it's smart and sharp-witted in a new way, for a new age of high-concept silliness.

Kurt Loder is the film critic for Reason Online. To find out more about Kurt Loder and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators website at www.creators.com.

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