Buzzfeed article ranking: 6
This movie came out in 1996, which makes it the one of two pre-Brink! movies on this list. (The other one, The Paper Brigade, I've never seen.) The Disney Channel made a major shift in the focus of its original movies around 1998, and it definitely shows here. Wish Upon a Star was aired under the banner "Disney Channel Premiere Films" (or "PremEars"), and it has much more mature content than anything else on the list.
Katherine Heigl and Danielle Harris play sisters Hayley and Alexia Wheaton, two high school students who both are unsatisfied with their lives and resent and envy each other. Alexia is the older, popular, socially well-adjusted sister with the dream boat boyfriend (Donnie Jeffcoat from Wild and Crazy Kids); Hayley is the younger, intelligent, successful but uncool sister. When they both wish upon a falling star, they find their immaterial souls exchanged by an occult force.
This of course is nigh-indistinguishable from the plot of Freaky Friday, and it creates the same strange impression. For 80% of the movie, we see Hayley in Alexia's body and vice-versa, and it gets to the point that we forget what each sister's "real" personality is. Then, when they switch back at the end, everything seems to be backwards.
The sisters soon realize that they will have to remain in each other's bodies permanently unless they take immediate supernatural corrective action. In the meantime, they dedicate themselves to ruining one another's lives. In one scene, Alexia (in Hayley's body) comes to school dressed in an S&M costume and attempts to perform a striptease on a cafeteria table. On the Disney Channel. Then they write the word "wench" on a mirror in lipstick.
Eventually, the girls realize that they have more in common than they thought. They decide that they'd better do what they can to better one another's lives before reversing the unholy mojo that has switched their minds. Hayley helps Alexia apply for college, and Alexia helps Hayley strike up a romance with the moose-looking kid next door.
This is an okay movie, but better than Smart House? I don't think so.
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