Zapped!

Both the horror classic Carrie and the cult comedy Zapped! use their “psychic abilities as puberty” metaphors to grossly generalized ends, but there’s a grain of truth to the behavior of Scott Baio’s teenage telekinetic in Zapped!. After all, if a pubescent science geek actually acquired telekinetic powers in a freak laboratory accident, chances are he’d use them to no greater end than persistently undressing Heather Thomas. Wildly horny though its protagonists may be, Zapped! is kept from overly leering territory by a cartoonish sensibility that eventually lands Scatman Crothers in a weed-induced hallucination where he and Albert Einstein are assaulted with salami. 

Updated 06/07/2011