“Could the ugly, untalented gays please report to the principal’s office,” because the trailer for Bottoms, the lesbian fight club comedy we’ve been waiting for since it was announced last year, is officially here. Starring Rachel Sennott, Ayo Edebiri and Kaia Gerber, the high school sex comedy follows two unpopular queer girls in their senior year who start a fight club to try to impress and hook up with cheerleaders, and have sex before graduation.
The film premiered earlier this year at SXSW to absolutely rave reception. “Balls to the wall insane with a brilliant balance of emotion and pitch black humour,” said one reviewer, while another praised its “unabashed queerness, a fucking hilarious script, and a cast of star-making performances”. In the trailer, we see setting up their fight club, which becomes an unexpected success and soon the most popular girls in the school are beating each other up.
Speaking to Dazed in 2021, director Emma Seligman said Bottoms is the film she wishes she could have seen when she was in high school and longed for “fun, more raunchy depictions of queer women.”
“We’ve gotten the conversion therapy story, the very cutesy story, and others as well – I love a lot of those movies,” she continued. “But Rachel really wanted to see something with really shitty female characters who are just despicable in their actions in the way that we’ve seen a lot of male characters in raunchy comedies, and I wanted something for queer teen girls. We met in the middle.”
Calling the fight club “more like a self-defence club,” Seligman said the girls don’t really know what they are doing. “They’re mostly punching each other. We call it a fight club because it’s two girls trying to prove that they’re tough, appealing, and attractive to other women, like the cheerleaders at their school.”
The film will be released in the US on August 25. In the meantime, enjoy the trailer above.
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