In 1999’s The Bad Girl, Dawn and Jan are high school students who, while fooling around in the chemistry lab, accidentally create a serum that they subsequently discover can bring the dead back to life.

At first, they just bring a frog back to life.  Then, they bring a dog back to life.  Dawn and Jan are apparently more powerful than God and they’re just in high school!  Still, being all powerful doesn’t make it any easier for Dawn to balance her boyfriend, Clint, with her secret boyfriend, Will.  Nor does it make their classmate Cindy any less annoying.  Cindy is the type who always follows the rules and who is quick to snitch to the teachers if anyone does anything wrong.  Everyone went to school with someone like Cindy and no one could stand her.  Of course, today, the Cindys of the world spend their time on social media, reporting people for violating the terms of service and telling everyone to “wear the damn mask.”

(Remember when the folks on twitter suddenly decided that Nurse Ratched was actually the hero of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?  We live in a world of Cindys.)

Anyway, Jan and Dawn may not like Cindy but they still feel bad after they accidentally run her over in their car.  So, they usually their special formula to bring Cindy back to life.  Cindy returns but she doesn’t seem to be too happy about that and soon, she’s seeking revenge on everyone who she feels has mistreated her.  It doesn’t help that having been brought back from the dead has not only given Cindy super strength but it has also made her impervious to harm, as Jan and Dawn discover when they continually try to kill her.  Eventually, they do find out that the serum can cause those recently risen to explode but how do they trigger the explosion?  I’m just going to go ahead and be a spoiler and say that the explosions are triggered by ridicule.  So, bullying is the solution, regardless of what Dr. Phil might say.

As far as the Fear Street books are concerned, this was pretty dumb but I did like the fact that Dawn and Jan just happened to accidentally create a serum that can bring the dead back to life.  I mean, what are the chances of just accidentally creating something like that?  I imagine that there are scientists who have spent their whole lives trying to do what Dawn and Jan managed to do in just two minutes of dumping together random chemicals in the chemistry lab.  I mean, this is the equivalent of an episode of Saved By The Bell where Zack and Slater accidentally bring back Becky the Duck and Artie the Chameleon.  The fact that these two idiots can do it just by randomly mixing chemicals together leads me to suspect that maybe I’ll accidentally discover the formula as well someday.  Of course, I’ll be a bit more careful about it than our protagonists were.  Seriously, just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should!