It’s a sign of the times that Rob Schneider and erstwhile Wayne’s World babe Tia Carrere are old enough to play the adults in Wild Cherry, one of those head-feint hormonal comedies that would perhaps seem to promise an endless supply of boozy high school partying and topless chicks, but in actuality is a tale of a trio of savvy babes turning the tables on some of their boneheaded brethren.

The front-and-center star is Tania Raymonde (Jeff Goldblum’s ex-arm candy, above left), who plays Helen McNicol, a virginal good girl who lives alone in a small town with her dad (Schneider), and dates high school classmate and footballer Stanford (Ryan Merriman, above right). Her friends, Katyln Chase (Rumer Willis) and Trish Van Doren (Kristin Cavallari), are a bit more romantically experienced but also virgins. When they discover their names in a legendary book that pairs the school’s senior virgins with football players — ostensibly to bring good luck — the ladies undertake a series of pranks to get back at Franklin (John White), “Skeets” (Jesse Moss) and a bunch of other guys, and show them who’s really in charge.

There’s a convoluted history of writing credits pegged to director Dana Lustig’s film, which contributes a bit to a feeling that ghost traces of tonally disparate material have been mashed up against one another. Raymonde (not to mention the rest of the cast) seems far too old for a high schooler, but actually has a bit of eye-batting charm. Unfortunately, she’s not given much with which to work, as the script cycles through all sorts of expected set-ups and montages.

Wild Cherry isn’t terrible, but its pedestrian rewards — Schneider, for instance, rather astonishingly tries to craft a recognizably human character — aren’t really likely to satisfy the target demographic of a movie featuring a midriff-baring girl in a “69”-emblazoned T-shirt on its cover. It pulls too many punches, really, and bits that seemingly most squarely hit the target at which the movie is aiming — that of a femme-centric American Pie sequel — are delivered with a kind of winking, too-chaste apologia that cleaves them from the emotional honesty of a teenager discovering their body. When Katyln and Trish give Helen an “iBod” (which supposedly pegs a vibrator to the rhythms of bass-happy music), Helen fitfully monkeys around with it for a bit before turning to a water faucet, then a carrot, and then the washing machine. There’s a really interesting — and still quite funny, I’m sure — movie to be made about teenage girls figuring out their bodies and learning about sex before actually having it, but Wild Cherry just isn’t that film.

Housed in a regular Amaray case with partially hollowed-out spindles (to use less plastic), Wild Cherry comes to DVD with a complementary cardboard slipcover, presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound track that more than adequately handles the title’s meager aural requirements. Optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles are also included. An action menu screen will drive viewers insane in less than 10 minutes if its chirpy background pop music is left turned up too loud, but apart from the requisite chapter stops (of which there are a dozen) and a version of the trailer, there are unfortunately no supplemental extras, not even an EPK-style making-of featurette. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C- (Movie) D (Disc)

The conundrum facing many independent-minded would-be filmmakers is how much, if any, attention to pay to the marketplace. Ignorance to the commercial realities of eventual distribution (in whatever form) is dangerous, and yet pandering to patty-cake notions of superior “character-rooted narrative” has resulted in its own set of collective sins, I’d argue — a robust slate of risible low-fi product in which ethnically diverse families come of age in America, small town soldiers return home from Iraq, or various combinations of philandering hipsters grapple with heroin, dyslexia and coming out of the closet. Multi-hyphenate Todd Berger’s The Scenesters intuitively understands this — what makes voracious but mainstream-leaning film audiences queasy or skeptical about “indie” film as a more broadly categorized movement — and has loads of fun twisting it in all sorts of pretzel shapes in service of a rangy, noir-tinged murder comedy.

A quirky and engaging film that honors many of the conventions of classic whodunit? cinema while also giving them both a modern spin and a deconstructive nudge to the ribs, The Scenesters  centers on a smarmy, out-of-work film director named Wallace Cotton (Berger) and his equally self-centered producer, Roger Graham (Jeff Grace), who land work as crime scene videographers, and set out to make some great art. They quickly stumble across crime scene cleaner Charlie Newton (Blaise Miller, resembling a cross between Casey Affleck and Dwight Yoakam), a schlubby, down-on-his-luck guy who’s quietly honed a superb sense of deduction through his work.

As a couple of apathetic detectives (Kevin Brennan and Monika Jolly) investigate a series of killings in ultra-hip East Los Angeles, Charlie discovers clues that link together the killings, which convinces Wallace and Roger that Charlie is himself the perfect subject around which to center an investigative movie. As the body count mounts — and Charlie is encouraged to romantically reconnect with a beautiful reporter, Jewell Wright (Suzanne May), at the center of the story — Wallace and Roger angle to stay ahead of the killer, and craft a winning documentary, no matter the outside corporeal toll.

Reminiscent in some slight ways of Russell Brown’s The Blue Tooth Virgin, another inside-Hollywood tale that wasn’t afraid to showcase under-the-radar ambition in ways that didn’t always flatter its characters, The Scenesters unfolds against the backdrop of an appropriately hipster-friendly soundtrack that includes the Airborne Toxic Event, the Cribs, Wallpaper, Le Switch and more. Scream is obviously something of a touchstone inspiration here (and Chinatown, too, for the film within the film), but the shoegazing, mumblecore cinema of the Duplass brothers also rates mentioning, both because of this movie’s DIY ethos and the fact that it’s simultaneously self-aware about the dangers of arthouse pretension. Berger’s film spins off all sorts of jokey asides (Charlie’s crime scene training video, a music video from a side project rock band one of the cops fronts), as well as a trial session framing device that features Sherilyn Fenn as a prosecutor and John Landis as the judge, and sometimes these bits don’t connect. Or, rather, they play OK as scenes, but muddy the editorial collection as a whole — a sense of how much what an audience is watching is formed after the fact, and by whom, after the conclusion of the murder spree mystery at its core.

Smartly, though, Berger seeds his film with all sorts of mini-conflicts and personality clashes, which makes for much fun and amusement. His dialogue has some salty bite (“Would it kill people to find bodies during magic hour — I feel like I’m on the face of the sun,” Wallace bitches at one crime scene), and doesn’t always dwell on its punchlines, in a hamfisted effort to drill them home, and let you know how “smart” it is. A few of the performances aren’t quite up to the par with the material, and the movie could have benefited from a bit more rakish snap to its telling, particularly in the finale. But The Scenesters has in abundance what every independent film yearns for — intrigue and a cocksure rhythm that doesn’t ever feel false. If its plotting doesn’t in the end leave much room for a big surprise, that’s no reason not to surrender to the pleasures it provides along the way. Sometimes a nice slice of archness can be a good thing.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, The Scenesters comes to DVD presented in a 16×9 aspect ratio, with closed captioning and a Dolby 2.0 stereo audio track. A music video, a clutch of deleted scenes and a nice little behind-the-scenes featurette make up the slate of bonus materials. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B+ (Movie) B- (Disc)