Ya gotta love those late-summer doldrums. This is the time of year, second only to the month of February, when the studios release all of the pictures in their vault that they're sure no one will want to see. Occasionally that may be a smart quirky film with a limited audience, but more often it's crap.

Crap is the best word to describe Teaching Mrs. Tingle, the directorial debut of screenwriter Kevin Williamson. Williamson blazed on to the scene some years ago with the wonderful Scream, and subsequently has written a couple of half-decent horror flicks as well as Scream 2, which in my estimation is even better than the original. Since his last screenplay, The Faculty, he's been working in television, and it apparently has softened his brain. That's the only possible explanation for Teaching Mrs. Tingle, a comedy/thriller that isn't funny, isn't suspenseful, and is as lifeless and dull as its white suburban guitar ballad soundtrack.

The premise is that the #2 girl in the class, Leigh Ann (Katie Holmes) needs a good grade in her history class to make valedictorian, which according to this dubious story is the only way she can go to college. Unfortunately, her history teacher is the malicious Mrs. Tingle (Helen Mirren), who has the entire student body and faculty cowed and seems to have a personal dislike for Leigh Ann. When Mrs. Tingle catches Leigh Ann and her friends Jo Lynn (Marisa Coughlan) and Luke (Barry Watson) with an illicit copy of her final exam, it looks like Leigh Ann's future is ruined.

The three youths go to Mrs. Tingle's house to try to explain how Leigh Ann happened to have the exam (it was slacker Luke's fault), and somehow one thing leads to another and Mrs. Tingle gets shot with a crossbow and tied to a bed while the kids try to figure out what to do with her. Everything up to this point was pretty dry, but once Tingle's tied up, the film really gets tiresome. There are no twists or even bumps in the road of this colorless screenplay. It's the most boring film of the soft-core teeny-bopper thriller genre since . . . oh, I don't know, since Brainscan, scripted by Seven scenarist Andrew Kevin Walker.

Helen Mirren is a pro who's watchable in any situation, but as Mrs. Tingle she's got very little to work with. She's got the look and the sound down, but the script saddles her with terrible dialogue, full of Lecter-esque mind games and grade school literary allusions. As the two lead teens, Katie Holmes and Barry Watson are a bland whitebread pairing. They came from TV and ought to stay there. Dick recently proved that there are kiddie actors out there with personality, but Holmes and Watson (oh fuck, I just noticed that!) have none on display. Fairing a little better is Marisa Coughlan as Jo Lynn. One of two bright spots in the film is her off-the-cuff good-parts rendition of The Exorcist which is weird and fun to watch.

The other bright spot in the film is when Jeffrey Tambor shows up as Mrs. Tingle's "spank buddy", creating one of the film's few complications. There are some laughs generated when the kids get him drunk in order pose him for compromising photos. You don't really buy it, but it's a welcome respite from the bleakness of the rest of the film.

Some bad movies can be recommended as a diversion. Teaching Mrs. Tingle is actually a trial to sit through, and should be avoided at all costs.