Shana Feste directs this loose remake of Franco Zeffirelli's iconic 1981 film starring Brooke Shields and Martin Hewitt, which raised eyebrows with its teasing tagline: "She is 15, he is 17. The love every parent fears."

Parents should not fear this contemporary spin on affairs of the teenage heart.

The clumsy script, co-written by Joshua Safran, is a lacklustre imitation of the gooey romances peddled by Nicholas Sparks.

Both laughably earnest and simply laughable, Endless Love piles on the cliches and contrivances like a club sandwich, stacking poorly sketched characters atop stilted dialogue and woeful performances.

The result is unwieldy and difficult to swallow.

The film's squeaky clean heroine is model student Jade Butterfield (Gabriella Wilde), who has sacrificed relationships to study hard and fulfil the dreams of her parents, Hugh (Bruce Greenwood) and Ann (Joely Richardson).

Her isolation is exacerbated by the death of older brother Chris (Patrick Johnson), whose bedroom is a shrine to the golden boy of the clan.

At the behest of her surviving brother Keith (Rhys Wakefield), Jade embraces life by falling head over heels for reformed bad boy, David Elliot (Alex Pettyfer), who is a valet at her country club.

The fling is all-consuming and Jade decides to forego an internship before medical school to spend the summer with David. The teenagers embark on a turbulent journey of sexual discovery that leaves Ann feeling giddy.

However, Hugh is enraged and when he learns about skeletons in the young paramour's closet, the patriarch vows to protect Jade using any means necessary.

Endless Love bears scant resemblance to the 1981 picture. The iconic theme duet by Diana Ross and Lionel Richie has been supplanted by indie-rock and -pop laments from Tegan And Sara, Tanlines, Franz Ferdinand and Echosmith.

Pettyfer's brooding beau is treated more sympathetically. He's hunky, caring, manages to throw a surprise birthday party for Jade with a couple of telephone calls and initially rebuffs her amorous advances because he "can wait".

Wilde faces the more difficult task of fashioning a likeable heroine in the absence of credible dialogue. What teenager, in the throes of a heated argument in the middle of the street, would honestly deliver this parting shot: "You're a coward. You're terrified of love, you don't fight for it"?

Greenwood is reduced to the snarling two-dimensional villain, threatening David's car mechanic father (Robert Patrick) with a restraining order because, "I've lost one child. I'm not losing another one - not to your low-life son!"

Joely Richardson suffers even greater indignity as a creatively blocked writer, who lives vicariously through her daughter and gushes at one point, "It's your love that inspires me, Jade - inspires me every day."

Presumably it inspires her to unscrew her Prozac prescription and drift into dreamy oblivion.