Director: Tamara Olson
Starring: Olivia Alaina May, Lauren Walsh, Todd Leigh, and Dustin Harnish
Netflix Predicted Score: 1.0 stars
Nine days in, and here we are with our second movie produced by Asylum, those goofball hucksters known for their naked ripping of titles, box art, and whatever else they can reasonably steal from major blockbuster films for their own miserable, hacky, direct-to-video schlock. In this case, Asylum's after the teen sex comedy crowd with The 18-Year-Old Virgin. The title is an obvious 40-Year-Old Virgin rip, but the movie (and its shitty poster art) are pretty clearly after the American Pie franchise (such as it is these days), with pepperings of teen comedy outliers like Can't Hardly Wait thrown in for good measure. Would you be surprised to learn that this movie isn't funny in the slightest? If you answered yes, you haven't been paying attention to this feature for the last nine days.
Note: Hopefully this is the last time I will attempt to do this without clips. Live shows are crazy and equipment intensive! Sorry!
The Premise: Katie Powers (May) is exactly what all nerdy girls in movies tend to be: Physically clumsy, vaguely neurotic, and also kind of hot underneath her glasses and frumpy clothes. In the movie land that she occupies, she's a virgin, and apparently, that is some absurd turn-off to the entire male populous. I don't know how the species is able to propagate itself in that kind of scenario, but whatever. Anyway, point is, Katie has a gigantic crush on megahunk Ryan (Harnish), one she's harbored ever since he supposedly snuck a quick Halloween kiss with her many, many years prior. Katie wants him bad, but he won't sleep with a virgin. Hey, here's a novel idea, what if she spends the entirety of the last senior class party to bang just about ANY guy who will have her, just so she can get together with her virgin-phobic dreamboat?
How Does All of That Go? HILARIOUS...ANTICS...ENSUE...well, not exactly. There are antics, but the hilariousness of them is fairly questionable. You know, the teen sex comedy is one of those things that is by no means something to hold sacred in any way, shape or form, but the crass laziness on display here by everyone involved really does kind of chap my hide. There is no joke in this movie that isn't ripped directly from another movie, and poorly, at that. Katie runs the gauntlet of sex-starved dudes, including an asshole dodging his girlfriend, a tanta-obsessed hippy guy, a menage-a-trois already in progress, and, of course, the slightly geeky but still ridiculously handsome boy who has had a crush on HER for all these years. At one point she even ends up accidentally blowing a geriatric coma patient. So, there's that...
So, Not So Funny Then? I'll say this much for The 18-Year-Old Virgin: The makers of this movie at least bothered to watch the movies they were stealing from. But the script is completely bereft of any joke that doesn't require nudity-based sight-gags and talking penises with French accents. There's no concept of comedic timing anywhere on display here. Katie just moves from dude to dude trying to get fucked, getting nowhere, and in between retreats to her sex-crazed best friend who sets her right back on the path to slutdom again. A key example? The idea of her getting together with crazy tantric boy is sort of a funny concept, but the execution is miserable. The guy, who OF COURSE is over-acting to the hilt, spends minutes, MINUTES of screen time just rambling about energy and feeling the vibes and whatever else, while leaving a confused Katie sitting there in her underwear. Director Tamara Olson clearly has no idea how to stage this to wring any laughs out of the bit, so we're treated to a few stabs at weird sexual positions, a lot of breathing and moaning, and a couple of craaaaaaazy misunderstandings. It's. Just. Not. Funny.
But Hey, There's Nudity, Right? Oh, sure, copious amounts of it, and from reasonably attractive women, at that. Here's my thing though, and I'll put this to you: When you're watching topless women run around and be topless and such, you're looking for some measure of titillation, yeah? Cool, so this movie? It's got none of that. There are boobs, a few spectacular ones even, but again, the staging of these nude scenes and the myriad stupidity going on make it quite a challenge to get any measure of enjoyment out of all them flopping, bouncing boobies. If I were a horny teenage boy, I'd be pretty bummed by what was on display here. It's just not sexy, Jack. It's not sexy like it should be.
What Kind of Terrible Is This Movie? The highly derivative and entirely unfunny kind. Though my few experiences with Asylum's brand of film forgery have largely been relegated to the action/sci-fi genres, 18-Year-Old Virgin as that altogether unmistakable stink of Asylum-brand snake oil all over it. Whether it's the cast of hammy bit actors, the cheap-as-hell production, the soundtrack that sounds like some random southern Californian asshole's iPod shuffle mix, and, most of all, the total and complete lack of any of the qualities one would expect from one of the real movies this one is trying to ape, this movie is Asylum through and through, and by that I mean it's unwatchable, unfunny garbage.
Tomorrow: Havoc
