While your parents and a whole load of ill-informed literature might have told you that high school would bring you the best days of your life, at least one week in that stuffy blazer will have told you otherwise.
Let's face it, our teenage years were more Inbetweeners than they were Skins. Filled with embarrassment, humiliation and unwanted nudity, school was a barrage of awkwardness.
And although many films might have pushed the agenda of beautiful twentysomethings parading as kids, others were braver in showing the more cringe-inducing side of being in high school. Here are eight of the most awkward high school scenes in film.
Napoleon Dynamite
Okay so of course, there is something utterly stupendous about Napoleon's passionate dance to Jamiroquai's Canned Heat. But given the context, a high school talent show, it does make you want to cave into the ground quite a lot. A for the moves, D for the timing.
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About A Boy
We're sticking with the talent show theme for this one as a very young Nicholas Hoult makes the ill-advised decision to sing Killing Me Softly, with just a lonely tambourine as backing, in front of an audience of cruel teenagers. Even when Hugh Grant steps in to save the day, it only makes things worse...
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American Pie
Moving onto another recurring theme in high school movies: finding yourself behind enemy lines. And in this instance. enemy lines refers to the girls toilets. Especially when Stifler has spiked your drink with a laxative...
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Pretty In Pink
More bathroom-based embarrassment here and this time from an 80s classic. Again, bullies are to blame. This time, they throw poor Duckie in there and eager to brush it off, he pretends that it was actually a deliberate move. You know, because high school bathroom inspections by students are a genuine thing.
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Superbad
To be fair, most of Superbad is awkward. If you took pretty much any scene, it would work perfectly in this list. The tale of two socially inept teens provided a realer look at the awkwardness of high school than many of its slicker peers. This scene was particularly difficult to watch for its horribly realistic chain of awfulness. We might not have been in the exact situation but replace the word punch with graze, and we're facepalming.
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Back to the Future
Now there's a fine line here between awkward and, ermmm, a bit sick so this brief kiss between Marty McFly and HIS MOTHER is quite possibly the hardest video to watch on this list. Thankfully, it's the moment where she finally stopped flirting with her son. So that's something.
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Sixteen Candles
In another John Hughes teen movie classic from the 80s, his muse Molly Ringwald suffers from a parade of embarrassments. The main one being that the geek, played by Anthony Michael Hall, has a crush on her. In this scene, his attempt to woo her with dance is, well, problematic.
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