[Nerdspresso] Forgetting Mrs. Tingle

Cruising the streaming channels for what to watch is like combing the beach with a metal detector. Sometimes you find a gold coin, but often you just unearth a discarded tin can. While perusing Paramount+ recently, I stumbled across a title that I hadn’t thought about since the late nineties. A flick that I had considered paying to see back when it was in theaters when I had more disposable income, free time, and much less discriminating taste.

So with a few hours to kill on a Thursday evening, I pulled up this remnant of a bygone era to see what I had missed in 25 years of movie watching. Spoiler alert: not much. Some films should be left unwatched, but thanks to the algorithm, nothing stays forgotten forever. Teaching Mrs. Tingle was a comic thriller that was released back in the late summer of 1999. It was the directorial debut of North Carolina native Kevin Williamson, who was a hot property around that time for penning Scream, The Faculty, and I Know What You Did Last Summer, as well as creating the teenybopper drama Dawson’s Creek. 

Teaching Mrs. Tingle starred hot young things Katie Holmes (Dawson’s Creek), Barry Watson (7th Heaven), and Marisa Coughlan (Super Troopers). It was intended as a funny and cynical take on high school along the lines of Heathers and Election, but totally missed the mark. It has none of the biting wit of those previous films and lacks the sass and danger of Williamson’s Scream movies. Teaching Mrs. Tingle is even minus the overwrought sincerity that made Dawson’s Creek such a guilty pleasure, which is surprising given its writer and star. 

This flick just suffers from a bad case of the mehs. There is nothing special about it, which is saying something because the actor portraying Mrs. Tingle is none other than the incomparable Dame Helen Mirren! How did they score her for this silly thriller starring a bunch of teen idols from the CW? I guess money talks. Mirren has never been above trading her pedigree for a quick buck. She also did a couple Fast & Furious movies and played a villainous deity in the latest Shazam sequel. No judgment here. Actors have to eat, too.

While watching this one, I wracked my brain to remember Mirren’s status back in 1999. I couldn’t remember any buzz around her being cast in this thing. I wasn’t even aware that she was in this movie. And, as you know, I’m a HUGE movie nerd. I should know these things. She definitely wasn’t a nobody back then, but she also wasn’t a household name. During this time, she was known more for esoteric arthouse flicks than big popcorn fare. Her name wasn’t even included above the title on the movie’s poster. 

By the late nineties, Mirren’s most popular roles were probably Morgan Le Fay in John Boorman’s King Arthur epic Excalibur, Roy Scheider’s cosmonaut confidant in Peter Hyams’s sci-fi sequel 2010, and the steely detective in British TV’s Prime Suspect. It makes me think that Williamson didn’t really know what he had with this casting. He doesn’t seem to make full use of the power at his disposal. Mirren is wasted as a spiteful high school history teacher who seems to take glee in berating her students and tormenting her co-workers, including Breakfast Club alum Molly Ringwald and This is Spinal Tap’s Michael McKean.  

It’s not that she couldn’t have made a feast out of the scenery chewing available here. It’s more like she wasn’t hungry or no one even rang the dinner bell. Mirren is restrained throughout the film except when she’s playing mind games with her young co-stars. Even then she really gets only one moment to truly shine. It’s in a confrontation with Katie Holmes close to the film’s climax. She shares why she so disdains her student, but the script fails her. We’re supposed to believe she’s eternally frustrated over being stuck in the small town where she grew up. The scene just doesn’t play because Mirren’s presence simply overpowers this caricature of a hateful spinster. 

You can’t accept her as an over-the-hill townie when she’s dressing down Holmes with posh, flawless elocution. She’s just too classy. Mrs. Tingle is supposed to be the villain, but she just comes off like a crabby elitist with a grudge. The movie is set in motion when Katie’s character, Leigh Ann, gets a bad grade on her history final, putting her college scholarship at risk. Confronting Mrs. Tingle doesn’t help so Leigh Ann commiserates with her friends, drama queen Jo Lynn (Coughlan) and slacker Luke (Watson). 

They console her by sharing a pilfered copy of Tingle’s final exam, which Leigh Ann promptly refuses. Tingle interrupts the trio, discovers the stolen exam, and blazes a trail to the principal’s office. Leigh Ann gets a momentary reprieve because the principal has checked out early for the day. With her entire future in jeopardy, Leigh Ann and her pals go to Tingle’s house later that night to plead her case. Tingle is in no mood so things escalate and before you know it, the kids have her bound and gagged in the upstairs bedroom.

Hastily concocting a plan, they decide to keep her tied up until they can persuade her to change Leigh Ann’s grade and forget about this whole mess. In a better film, these heightened circumstances would lead to madcap hijinks and a sardonic take on overacheiving students, harsh teachers, disappointment, and lost dreams. Instead, we get a lot of montages set to ’90’s mope rock. Who needs story and character development when we can have hip tunes playing over shots of empty rooms and rainy streets?

The premise of this movie is completely wasted to achieve a lukewarm resolution that feels slapped together at the last minute. You keep waiting for a big reveal for why Mrs. Tingle is so bitter and awful. You’re hoping for a moment that reveals hidden layers or a scene that goes really deep to expose the dark underbelly of high school history finals. We get that one knockout scene between Mirren and Holmes, but it’s not enough to justify everything that’s gone before. At its core, this flick is just about kids upset that they didn’t get a good grade from their scary teacher. The movie is just one big shrug. 

Okay, there are also a couple of exciting bits when our heroes wield a crossbow, but it’s a waste of a good medieval weapon. There’s nothing really at stake here. A decade earlier, Heathers wove a similar tale of teens in over their heads but those filmmakers chose to go fully gonzo. And guess what? We’re still quoting that movie today. Teaching Mrs. Tingle plays it safe and pays the price. It never becomes more than a collection of awkward scenes with attractive people saying and doing things that would only happen in the movies.

Teaching Mrs. Tingle is a curiosity from another time. At one point, movie theaters were packing in audiences every weekend with the latest teen thriller. In addition to Williamson’s contributions to the genre, there was The Craft, Urban Legend, The Skulls, and Halloween H20. Practically every starlet on the CW could walk off the set of their TV show and into a movie deal. Films like these are now mostly relegated to the streamers and cable TV. I’m not saying that Teaching Mrs. Tingle was this trend’s dying gasp, but its mediocrity probably helped speed up the demise.