James Huth seems to have made Hell Phone just so France can say to America, ‘See ? We can make incredibly sophomoric teen films too!’

As if this were a good thing.

In fact, all Huth, the director of the 2005 box office winner Brice de Nice, really has accomplished is the recycling of every American teen film from the ‘80s to the present, added in a lot of Beverly Hills 90210, and tossed in plenty of shots of the Panthéon, slapping it all together in a truly awful film that every teenager in France will see.

From the title alone, one can guess at the plot of this film.

There’s a cell phone.

It comes from hell.

Boy meets cell phone, boy falls in love with cell phone, boy realizes cell phone is evil, boy has to get rid of cell phone before everybody dies.

Got it?

The boy, named Sid (his mother was a big Sex Pistols fan), is played by Jean-Baptiste Maunier, the angel-faced 16-year-old who starred in the wonderful post-war piece, the César and Oscar-nominated Les Choristes of 2004.

Sid, a poor skater kid, needs a cell phone, because without one he can never hope to impress the rich and beautiful Angie, played dully by Jennifer Decker.

In a scene reminiscent of Gremlins, he enters a dark Chinese antique shop (for where else would you go to buy a new cell phone?) and for 30€, purchases a sleek, one of a kind, Ferrari-red phone complete with tiny devil horns.

Little does he know the evil he is unleashing.

The evil, of course, is unleashed on the public, who has another hour and a half of film to watch.

It’s back at his high school where most of the mischief takes place.

He is in his last year of high school in the heart of the Latin Quarter, in the shadow of the Panthéon, home to the literary greats of French history.

(While Huth is hopefully not making allusions to his own screenwriting abilities for his work in that capacity on Hell Phone, at least he provided the kids some beautiful surroundings to film the movie.)

In real life, there are two high schools next to the Panthéon, the esteemed Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where Voltaire and Victor Hugo are but two of its famous alums (along with a guy named Jacques Chirac), and Lycée Henri IV, with origins tracing back to the Middle Ages, its list of graduates including names like Guy de Maupassant and Jean-Paul Sartre.

It is highly doubtful that the producers of Hell Phone used anything more than its location as a link between the fictional movie high school and such institutions, though, as nearly all the students are complete morons, and the teachers are even dumber.

The only intelligent girl in the school wears Princess Leia-style buns on either side of her head and is the only kid who raises her hand when a teacher asks a question.

Don’t worry; this intellectual insolence won’t be supported for long.

She gets her comeuppance when Sid’s love interest Angie wallops her upside the head with a baseball bat-sized piece of metal.

The ‘students’ are all exaggerated stereotypes.

There is the rich but morally base Virgile, Angie’s boyfriend at the outset, whose taste in fashion leads him to favor blazers, no shirt, and suspenders, crossed in the front of his skinny chest.

He slides around the screen with two stuck-up stooge friends, never demonstrating why exactly Angie might actually like him.

Angie, the daughter of an oddball sculptor and a famous skateboarder dad, never reveals what it might be about Virgile that attracts her, other than his money and good looks.

Decker plays her with no depth, and every scene with her in it is a struggle.

She shows only passing interest in Sid, even after he starts wielding the power of the Hell Phone.

It is only when he and she go on a skateboarding adventure through the Latin Quarter, chasing down a thief on a scooter who has stolen her iPod, that she really notices Sid.

The scene, a total knock-off from Back to the Future, includes Virgile and pals crashing their car into the side of the road, though luckily for them, they do not finish covered in manure, like poor Biff Tannen and friends.

Sid begins to realize that while he enjoys the perks that his Hell Phone provides him – the phone basically makes its own calls and hypnotizes people into doing whatever Sid wants, so he is able to get into a strip club, make the teachers eat their pet fish, and ‘win’ his mom a free trip to follow in the footsteps of her hero, Che Guevara – the evil the phone commits maybe isn’t such a good thing.

Throughout the film, Sid’s trusty pal Tiger tries to keep him on the straight and narrow, but Sid finds the power nearly irresistible.

Tiger (Benjamin Jungers), the spitting image of ‘80s-era star Corey Feldman, though with fiery red hair (but including those horn-rimmed glasses), is probably the most sympathetic character in the film.

He’s funny when he needs to be, serious when it’s called for, and like a good friend, he never gives up on Sid, even when Sid seems nearly consumed by the Dark Side.

In the big Night of the Living Dead finale, when pretty much everyone has become a Hell Phone zombie, it will be up to Sid, Tiger, and Angie to put an end to its evil deeds.

And while they do come up with a viable solution to putting the Hell Phone out of order permanently, the end of the film, like any good American teen schlock, leaves just enough wriggle room for the Hell Phone to one day resurface for the inevitably painful sequel.

Read more of Stephen Leonard's views on Paris at www.thenervousbreakdown.com/r_kent/, where he writes under the name R Kent.