DVD: American Virgin

This week was time for an Amy pick. She had picked American Virgin. This was a Year 2000 teen sex comedy sort of film. Of course, when I announced that this week’s movie night would be a Amy movie night, and since this was her current Netflix movie this would be what we would be watching (and I subsequently intercepted it at the mailbox to be sure I had it first so we could watch it) Amy announced that this was NOT a movie she wanted to watch with her parents. Brandy also took one look at the Netflix description of the movie:

When your father is a pornographer, what can you do to shock him? If you’re Katrina Bartalotti (Mena Suvari), you announce you’re going to lose your virginity — live on the Internet! Bob Hoskins co-stars as the mastermind behind the plan to broadcast Katrina’s deflowering. This wicked satire of the information age proves there are more than a few kinks left in the Net.

At that point Brandy said she was also pretty sure she didn’t want Amy watching this movie at all anyway. Yeah, I can understand that. Although I generally have the philosophy that if you are old enough that you WANT to see something, then you are old enough to actually see it… with appropriate context provided by parents as needed. But Brandy also said SHE didn’t want to watch it.

But since was the movie of the week, I was going to watch it at 05:00 UTC on Saturday no matter what happened damn it! I want to do a movie every week, and this was this week’s movie! And besides, it had Bob Hoskins in it. He was a real actor, it couldn’t be too bad could it? After all, he did Roger Rabbit and that was a good movie, right?

Wrong.

With the single lone exception of Jackass: The Movie which literally almost made me vomit in the theater it was so bad, this was pretty much the worst movie I have ever seen in my life.

OK, first of all, if you are supposed to be a teen sex comedy, there should actually be some sex, or at least some nudity. In the whole movie there was perhaps a grand total of 4 seconds of partial nudity of secondary characters. And while there was implied sex at one point, and implied simulated sex at maybe a couple of other points, there wasn’t even an actual real sex scene. Not even one. Not even a bad one, let alone a decent one.

What the movie actually had was 88 minutes of absolutely horrible acting, incredibly lame sex jokes that weren’t remotely funny, random people chasing and acting mad at each other, an unfunny and also undramatic scene of Bob Hoskins being tied up and essentially tortured, and of course an absolutely predictable ending.

After 30 minutes I had to pause the DVD and leave for a bit because it was just so bad. After seeing the look on my face when I came up during this break, the look of abject horror and disgust, Amy decided that maybe she didn’t want to see the movie at all after all. She asked me to PLEASE put it right back in the mail to Netflix when I was done.

Then I took a deep breath or two and headed back downstairs to finish the movie. It took a lot of will power to do so. It was just so bad. And the last 58 minutes of the movie were no better than the first 30. If anything, they were worse.

Having seen the whole movie, I don’t think it would have been particularly bad if Amy had watched it. I mean, it of course has sex jokes and sex references. But she is a teenager about to enter high school. It isn’t like she hasn’t seen or heard more explicit things elsewhere, including in movies we have watched together as a family, let alone the things that teenagers discuss amongst themselves. It is 2008 after all, not 1988 or 1968. (Not like those years were really all THAT much different other than ease of access to things due to the internet.) And there was nothing particularly wrong or offensive about it… other than the fact that watching something so horribly stupid has to leave a mark of some sort, perhaps permanently stripping away a couple of IQ points from anybody who watches it.

It was just awful.

Please, if you are ever tempted to rent this movie… don’t.

And if your teenager wants to watch it… I personally wouldn’t tell them no. I would however continuously make fun of them because of how insanely stupid a movie they were wanting to watch, and tell them if they really want to watch something in the teenage-sex-comedy-romp genre (which are mostly horrible, based on the few I have ever seen all or parts of) there MUST be better ones to choose from. There really must be. Right?

Oh, and I’d insist on sitting there watching it with them (even though it is so bad it would be somewhat painful) just to better make fun of them for wanting to see something so horrible.

Anyway. Don’t rent this movie. Really.