A lurid, unsavory mix of Reefer Madness hysteria, drive-in sleaze, and the queasy morality of '80s slasher films, New Best Friend plunges headlong into a decadent sorority world of heroin, martinis, Range Rovers, wild promiscuity, lipstick lesbianism, vibrators, catfights, bulimia, and abortions. But at heart, it's really a film about the cutthroat pursuit of financial aid. Director Zoe Clarke-Williams announces her intentions right away with a split-screen that sets her Madonna/whore dynamic into motion: On the left, frumpy wallflower Mia Kirshner flips through a book on college scholarships; on the right, a rich party-girl escorts some anonymous partner to a choice spot on her bedroom wall. Apparently, Clarke-Williams wants this outrageous conflation of class and sexual politics to be taken at face value, as if she were exposing the sexy secrets behind the college campuses of America. But with its wavering between cheap titillation and moral outrage, New Best Friend reaches a kind of heightened unreality, a place that could comfortably exist in the imaginations of both Pat Robertson and a pornographer. Though the film takes place at a small North Carolina university, the students' fiercely cliquish divisions are more familiar from movie high schools, with the hard-partying rich girls looking down on the bookish scholars who don't have jobs waiting for them after graduation. The two groups collide when Kirshner gets paired with the snobby Meredith Monroe for a major sociology thesis project on poor kids who are educated in a privileged environment. After being rejected for the financial aid she needs for law school, Kirshner gets a sorority-girl makeover and reinvests all her energy into the self-destructive hedonism of Monroe's circle of friends. When she overdoses on pharmaceutical cocaine, campus police officer Taye Diggs suspects foul play and continues his investigation in spite of an administrator's admonition to leave the rich kids alone. Told mostly in flashbacks as Diggs questions the suspects, New Best Friend keeps cutting from lurid sex scenes or drug binges to the same shot of Kirshner laid out in a hospital bed with tubes in her throat, as if there's a real cause-and-effect relationship. (If the film becomes a camp classic, the coma shots would make for a suitably ironic drinking game.) Shelved for three years and tagged with such Troy McClure working titles as Depraved Indifference and Mary Jane's Last Dance, New Best Friend resurfaces as a relic of the Kenneth Starr era, when scandal reports dripped with every salacious detail. Seen today, the film's skanky righteousness looks especially silly.