Mirror Mirror (1990)

Very LA goth teenager Megan (Rainbow Harvest, a name that brings up so many questions) and her mom move to a small town in nowhere, Iowa. Megan, being from the big city, shy, and a bit weird, does not hit it off with most of her new classmates. Only prospective class president Nikki (Kristin Dattilo), a friend of strays and weirdos, or so her vacuous boyfriend suggests, befriends her. Because Megan is not one to make her own life easier, she develops quite the crush on the nice-jock boyfriend of the school’s resident bitch queen (Charlie Spradling, only credited as “Charlie” for some reason), which does not make her social life any easier.

Because teen hormones and soap operatics are best taken with a bit of violence, an antique mirror left over from the earlier owner of the house Megan and her mom (Karen Black, alas not doing much) moved into turns out to be possessed by demonic forces. At first, it seems to react to Megan’s subconscious – and quite understandable – rage by magically murdering whosoever tortures or annoys the kid. Soon, however, Megan seems to control the destructive forces herself, while taking a nasty twist to her personality. Eventually, she’s outright possessed by the mirror and its powers. Only Nikki realizes something strange is going on, and tries her best to find out what exactly is up with Megan and her mirror, and get her friend back. There is, of course, a somewhat tragic story of sister love and murder connected to the mirror, and Megan and Nikki seem bound to repeat a variation on it.

Marina Sargenti’s only feature film – she did a bit of TV work later on, but only a couple of TV movies and a handful of episodes of various TV shows – is a perfectly decent entry into that horror subgenre concerning teenage misfits gaining some sort of supernatural power to take vengeance on the world that has treated them so badly. Its main problem is a certain lack of originality, so much of the character work feels a bit routine. So, Mirror Mirror goes through its well-worn motions, tropes and plot beats in an effective but not exactly riveting manner.

Of course, these tropes are well-worn because they are so relatable to many of the misfits at heart who have always made up large parts of the hardcore of horror movie fans (typically the people who stay with the genre no matter if it is in one of its cyclical upswings or downswings), and there’s nothing wrong with their presentation here. It’s good enough for what the film is doing, as faint as that praise may sound.

Also good enough for a decent time are the murders committed by the – mostly - invisible demon force; again, there’s nothing here that’s terribly original, but Sargenti’s direction is capable enough. As everything else about the movie, the horror set pieces are perfectly decent.

Really, Mirror Mirror’s main flaw is just that it’s so decent, competently made and keeping to the safest parts of horror country there’s very little about it you’ll remember as being actually exciting or weird. There is one scene of Megan dry-humping the mirror (who can hug back) that’s misguided and weird enough to please and so will in one way or the other reappear in the film’s three(!) sequels, but otherwise, this is very much the most average horror movie imaginable.