Starring Alexa Vega, Mika Boorem, and Sara Paxton. Rated general.

No one catches any Zs in Sleepover. They're too busy breaking the law trying to make the high-school A list. With its bad role models and anti-empowerment message for girls, however, the movie rates a big fat F.

Sleepover pits an inexplicably unpopular quartet of attractive 14-year-old gals against the it group in a nocturnal scavenger hunt, with the winners snagging the key lunch spot at school for next year. It's far-fetched in the extreme to believe that this would occupy the minds of kids on the last day of classes. More difficult to swallow is that the in crowd would agree to potentially relinquish their turf to anyone for any reason. But the moral here is not that fighting over a primo cheeseburger-scarfing site is an empty pursuit. The lesson here is "Be the most popular chick in school at any cost."

For social-status seekers Julie (the monotonous Alexa Vega, of Spy Kids trilogy fame) and her three pubescent schoolmates, this means tooling around in a swiped lime-green hybrid car to gather the sought-after booty. They're supposed to be home in bed, so the success of their illicit adventure relies on the unflagging idiocy of the men and boys in the film. Fortunately, mental ineptitude abounds in the form of Julie's hapless father, dorky brother, and a trio of repulsively nerdy "girl groupies" who stalk our protagonists throughout.

It speaks to Hollywood's ongoing celebration of the goofy guy that even a movie ostensibly for and about girls still hands the greatest romantic triumph and most yuks to one of the dorks. If girl power itself were a hybrid car, director Joe Nussbaum and screenwriter Elisa Bell have unplugged it here with a yank. The early feminist movement struggled, in small part, so that girls like Julie wouldn't have to skateboard while wearing a low-cut, red, sequined dress, hair billowing, to attract a boyfriend. Sleepover says they do. And you're fat? In Sleepover, that means the adorable, pudgy Yancy (Kallie Flynn Childress, the most sweetly natural of the girls) can tempt only the fat boy, and then she, not he, must be cringingly grateful.

Female liberation and maturity are also equated here with lawlessness. Kids break into stores and one another's homes with alarming frequency. When they're not demonizing a neighbourhood security officer (an ill-used Steve Carell), they're dressing like courtesans and hanging out in nightclubs with adult males they meet on-line. A scene wherein a smirking young miss lovingly musses a willing teacher's hair will have school officials and parents shuddering. One of the creepier aspects of Sleepover is that the leads, with their adult sassiness, cleavage, and criminal tendencies, are a mere 14. The film makes a good case for clamping electronic-monitoring bracelets on every girl under 16. Unless, say, she owns a well-thumbed copy of The Beauty Myth. Come to think of it, toss one the filmmakers' way too.