Taboo (2002)

For many millennials, the late 1990s and early 2000s were their formative years. Some were starting grade school at the turn of the millennium. Others were finishing high school. No matter what the case, those years were when they grew into the people they would be. They loved. They lost. They found what they liked and disliked. Millennials became adults and joined the working world. The movies of the time found new life with the growth of that generation.

Some of the most popular movies and television shows of that era involved teenage characters and early 20-something adults. Slasher movies and teen horror/thrillers made a huge comeback in that era, utilizing big stars and creating others. Sex comedies pushed their way to the top again. Romantic comedies involving high school and college students had their place as well. The millennial demographic was brought into the audience by seeing millennial characters on the screen. It was a big time for that age group.

One of the forgotten entries in that era was Taboo. Elizabeth (January Jones) was at a party with her friends when she came up with a game. They would anonymously answer yes or no questions about moral taboos just to see what the answers would be. One year later, Elizabeth was now engaged to Christian (Nick Stahl) and they invited those same friends over for New Year’s Eve. Partway through the reunion, it was revealed that someone knew about the taboos and what each of them said they would do. They had sent an envelope with slips of paper containing one word each that described the people who answered the questions. That person was playing a deadly game with the people who broke the moral taboos.

Taboo took many elements from other movies of the time. None were more apparent than the cast. Each of the actors was chosen for their connection to other, popular millennial properties. Amber Benson was chosen to play Piper, the drunk who was in love with Christian, because of her three seasons on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Eddie Kay Thomas was brought in for the role of Adam because he was one of the guys from the American Pie movies. Nick Stahl was coming off movies like Disturbing Behavior, Sunset Strip, and Bully, each filled with many of the popular “millennial” actors of the time.

The story of Taboo felt like it was an amalgamation of different stories told through that era of films. The initial idea of everything coming from a simple game where people anonymously shared their taboos felt like the killer in Urban Legend pulling from urban legends whenever they killed someone. The people being stalked through descriptions based on what their taboo answers were, and the year difference in time felt like the time jump and letter stalking in I Know What You Did Last Summer. Then there were the twists and turns that ended up being a puppet mastery sort of thing that felt very much influenced by the way Cruel Intentions twisted and turned. It even had every character be unlikable. Each element of Taboo seemed to be pulled from other, earlier teen movies of that era.

That Frankenstein’s monster of a movie never gelled together in the way that writer Chris Fisher and director Max Makowski probably wished it had. The New Year’s Eve setting didn’t add anything to the story outside of giving a specific date to when the events unfolded. There were no thematic elements that came from it and no visuals it provided. The acting brought nothing to the movie outside of recognizable faces. There were no standout performances. There was nothing memorable in what the actors were doing. Then there were the twists and turns throughout Taboo that were predictable from the start.

During the initial game in the opening scene, they answered the questions anonymously. Yet the characters made it blatantly obvious which question they got. One question was about whether someone would have sex with a minor. One of the characters mentioned that they had sex when they were fourteen, so they didn’t see what the big deal was. There was a question about getting paid to have sex, to which another character responded that she shouldn’t be shamed for liking sex. Things like that made it obvious who was being described by each word later in the film. When “rapist” was seen as one of the words, it was clear that the guy who defended having sex with a minor would be the one who had been caught sleeping with an underage girl. Though there were supposed to be surprise revelations about which person each word described, it was all clear from the start who was what.

There was another twist about halfway through the movie that pretty much reset everything. Taboo was a part of the millennial trend of the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since slashers were one of the biggest subgenres in that era, it tried to fit into that same container. The characters were killed off one-by-one as their unsurprising taboo secrets were revealed. The problem was that there were only six people in the movie. There needed to be more deaths. The twist was that the four people who died weren’t actually dead. They faked their deaths to get the mastermind to reveal their blackmailing plan from the initial game of taboo. Then they got killed all over again. Twice the kills without twice the cast. All because of a faked death twist.

Taboo tried to be clever with its twists, but the fact that the entire movie felt like an amalgamation of other, better movies made every reveal fall flat. The lacklustre acting didn’t help. There was nothing to make Taboo stand out among everything else that was released at the time. It came out as the surge of new teen-oriented movies were waning. There was an attempt made to have it fit among the others, yet it wasn’t good enough to stand on its own. It was a piece of the whole, but the whole was fine without it. It was disposable.

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a boom in movies geared towards millennials about millennial-aged characters. Millennials were going to theaters and seeing people their age on screen. They were relating to the characters because the characters were like them. Even if the characters were being killed or being horrible people, they felt like people the audience knew because they were the same age. They were experiencing similar friendships, school lives, and low-level jobs. Millennials were able to better connect with the characters because they related to the characters’ experiences, even if things got a little fantastical on screen.

Many millennials hit their formative years in the late 1990s and early 2000s. They were growing from children to adults and joining the workforce. They related to characters onscreen who were trying to do the same thing. It was a time when the films and the audiences came together and grew together. A multitude of genres. Movies that were good, movies that were bad, and movies that were entirely forgettable. A time in film that will never be forgotten.

Hopefully. these notes will be more memorable:

• Some of the other movies covered in Sunday “Bad” Movies posts to be a part of that late 1990s, early 2000s, millennial era of movies were April Fools (week 18), Dorm Daze (week 40), Leprechaun Back 2 Tha Hood (week 120), Chasing Liberty (week 155), 54 (week 266), From Justin to Kelly (week 325), On the Line (week 342), Wing Commander (week 394), Tammy and the T-Rex (week 408), and Halloween: Resurrection (week 413).
• Have you seen Taboo? What did you think of it? What did you think about this entire era of movies? Tell me all about it in the comments or on Twitter.
• If you go over to Twitter or scroll down to the comments, you can leave me suggestions about what movies I should be watching for future Sunday “Bad” Movies posts. I’m open to any suggestions and will usually plug most of them into the schedule as soon as I can.
• Make sure to check out Sunday “Bad” Movies on Instagram for plenty of bad movie fun.
• Next week will be the new year. With that, a whole new batch of movies will be ready for watching. The first movie that will get a post in 2021 will be none other than the 1991 flick Stone Cold. That’s right, ladies and gents. Brian Bosworth will be coming to Sunday “Bad” Movies next week. I, for one, am excited. I’ll see you then.