For some bizarre reason, the mid-'90s have been good to makers of low-budget, direct-to-video dramas about the seemingly uncommercial topic of sexually confused teenage girls tangled up in brutal murders. Arriving on the heels of the recent, similarly themed All Over Me and Ripe, Fun tells the story of two teenage girls—one hyper and flighty (Alicia Witt), the other somber and thoughtful (Renée Humphrey)—who meet, share a fun-filled afternoon, fall in love, and brutally murder an old woman in the course of one extremely busy day. The girls' stories are then told in flashbacks as they are interviewed by both a tough-talking social worker and a mildly sleazy hack reporter, both of whom attempt to play the girls off each other for their own gain. The first dramatic film by teen-sex-comedy specialist Rafal Zielinski (Loose Screws, National Lampoon's Last Resort), Fun is a generally uneven character study marred by a talky, meandering script that betrays its origins as a theatrical adaptation. It does, however, have its strengths: The acting is often extremely powerful, and the few scenes outside of the prison do an excellent job conveying the emptiness and decay of the girls' sunburnt crypt of a hometown. Those scenes are far too rare, however, as most of the film takes place in the women's prison, where the script's occasionally cheap and unconvincing psychologizing is offset by the force of the lead actresses' performances. Humphrey, who last worked with Zielinski in 1994's seemingly less ambitious C. Thomas Howell vehicle Jailbait, gives her underwritten character a solid, refreshing gravity, while Witt convincingly recreates adolescence as an extended series of tics and mannerisms. While deeply flawed, Fun ultimately contains enough powerful moments to make it worth seeing.