In “Freaky Friday,” Tess Coleman (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) and her 15-year-old daughter, Anna (Lindsay Lohan), stand just across the threshold from a change of life, trembling in each other’s direction.

Except for Anna’s little brother, who enjoys the chaos, the men in their lives — Tess’ fiance (Mark Harmon) and her father (Harold Gould) — spend most of the movie either in a protective crouch, or backing away slowly from some explosive plot device.

“Freaky Friday” — which, inexplicably, Disney is releasing on What-Were-They-Thinking Wednesday — shows what happens when a mother and daughter get some bad Chinese food and are magically switched into each other’s bodies. The transformation produces an excess of accessible feelings and a shortage of unarticulated thought, but “Freaky Friday’ triumphs by successfully striking comic notes when it could be making loud screeching noises.

This fish-out-of-water story is the summer’s second-best comedy, trailing only in the wake of “Finding Nemo,” Disney/Pixar’s fish-in-the-water story about fathers and sons. Suddenly, Disney’s nuclear family is having the last laugh, after having gone fission for several decades.

The idea of being able to jump into someone else’s body has an obvious appeal for Hollywood, where remakes have become a billion dollar body-snatching business. “Freaky Friday” is, in fact, a remake of the 1976 Disney hit of the same name, which starred Barbara Harris and a young Jodie Foster. It was also remade in 1995 as a TV movie starring Shelley Long.

But the new version proves you can’t have too much of a good thing, and also that if you are going to borrow a body, it might as well be Jamie Lee Curtis’. As Tess, she is a psycho-therapist and unraveling super-mom. She’s the kind of mother who urges her daughter to “make good choices!” and probably hopes they aren’t the same choices — or the same urges — she had in high school.

Anna is the school’s queen of detention, she has a little brother who drives her crazy and she has not yet accepted the idea that her mother is sufficiently recovered from the death of her first husband — Anna’s dad — to remarry. Like any normal teenage girl, she has a tendency to scream “You’re ruining my life!” at her family.

Playing the personality of her mother, Lohan is slightly bitter at first, then begins to add flavors that give the performance a nice complexity, like good wine. Curtis brings an irrepressible energy to her daughter’s altered ego, alternating between deeply sarcastic and horrified, the way teenage drama queens do.

Anna plays guitar and sings in a band called Pink Slip, whose big chance to audition at the House of Blues can only happen at the same time as her mother’s wedding rehearsal dinner. This eventually leads to the best scene in the movie, as Pink Slip takes the stage with Anna (who is really Tess) wielding a guitar she has no idea how to play, and Tess (who is really Anna) showing up to help.

It turns out that sisterhood — at least when it’s with your mother — is what comes from making good choices.

This story appeared in The Daily Herald on page F7.