We're about to get yet another cautionary tale for men who might like the barely ripe flesh of just-legal women. The Hollywood Reporter posts that DreamWorks' Montecito has just picked up a new comedy spec called Underage, which was written by Pink Panther 2 scribes Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber. It seems to have been a pretty hot script that a number of buyers were into, before Montecito grabbed it for $500,000 against $900,000.

The premise is simple: a 17-year-old girl is pissed off at her ex, so she seduces a twenty-something guy and blackmails him into her being her beau as an act of revenge. Something tells me that the dude should have checked her ID, and made sure it was real. What I don't get is how this plan works. I assume blackmail comes in because she is underage. So, if she forces this guy to pretend he's her man, presumably under the threat that she'll screw him with statutory rape charges if he doesn't, wouldn't pretending to be her man make it worse, and increase his chances at getting into trouble for his dalliances with this girl? Eh, this is the movies, so I'm sure they wrote their way around that.

We should expect to hear much more from this writing team in the near future. Neustadter and Weber not only collaborated on the next Pink Panther movie, but they're also the pens behind the upcoming Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel comedy, 500 Days of Summer, which Erik mentioned last week.

Obviously I'm one of those people who does NOT believe that violent films cause violent behavior, but I just caught wind of a strange little story from Australia that adds an interesting new angle to the discussion. You can read the full story right here, but the basic gist of it is this: Six underage inmates at an Australian juvenile detention center (two of which were there for sex-related offenses) were treated to a screening of the slasher sequel Wrong Turn 2: Dead End -- a flick that, yes, contains all sorts of nasty violence, casual nudity, and graphic sequences of cannibal-mutants in the act of (ahem) coitus.

Now, as much as I love the horror flicks, I doubt I'd play Wrong Turn 2 for any 14-year-old-types, let alone some kids who've been incarcerated for seriously anti-social behavior. But apparently one of the facility's recreation officers thought it was perfectly acceptable to show the nasty horror flick to a bunch of (at least somewhat) unbalanced youths. Needless to say, several Aussies are calling for the officer's dismissal. They also seem to be annoyed that the DVD was rented with taxpayers' money, but that seems a rather minor infraction, all things considered. (DVDs are pretty inexpensive and all.)

Wrong Turn 2 director Joe Lynch was a little snarky when he told Dread Central: "Although it seems that the unfortunate individuals involved have an impeccable taste in horror films, this was never intended to be shown in ANY correctional facility to emotionally fragile minds. Please be warned, Wrong Turn 2 could influence one to engage in uncontrollable fits of cannibalism or mutant diddling and is not meant for the easily impressionable ... or served with vegemite." But when I told the guy I wanted a slightly more serious response to the story, he told me this: "Films like Wrong Turn 2, as fun as they are intended to be, are extreme in their entertainment and honestly, shouldn't be shown to overly impressionable minds, especially in a government-run location like a correctional facility or a school. That seems pretty obvious to me."