Further substantiating my conviction that Mean Girls owes an uncomfortable amount of plot and theme to Heathers is the revelation that the director of the former is Mark Waters, whose brother Daniel, in addition to penning such screenplays as Demolition Man, and Batman Returns, wrote Heathers as a sort of high school Full Metal Jacket and claims (probably in jest) that he initially wanted Kubrick to direct the film.

Mean Girls is no Kubrick - though it doesn't attempt to be -- and it too often substitutes a boring, moralizing, heavy-handed preachyness and a fairly racist reliance upon deeply problematic tropes of African barbarism and the sexual appetites of Southeast asian teenagers (and here we get Full Metal Jacket after all) for Heathers' far darker critique of the construction of "teen suicide" and the commodification and exploitation of the adolescent in popular culture and in the filmic genre epitomized by the work of John Hughes.

Plus Lindsay Lohan is no Winona Ryder, and no amount of inexplicable shoplifting is going to change that.