A teen “comedy” from the guys who wrote “The Last Exorcism?” Yes, and it’s hard to know which film is scarier.
The comedy is “The Virginity Hit,” written and directed by Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland. The gimmick it shares with “Last Exorcism” is the format of a faux-documentary, that already-tired approach that allows for a low-fidelity look and a small budget.
In “The Virginity Hit,” four teenage guys make a pact to lose their virginity. Faster than you can say “American Pie,” three of the pals have fulfilled the agreement.
And so we focus on Matt (Matt Bennett, the poor man’s Jay Baruchel), the nerdiest of the group. But Matt has a longtime girlfriend, Nicole (Nicole Weaver), and they’ve set the date of their consummation.
They’ve also told their friends about the impending liaison, and the friends are not only videotaping the countdown to the event, but also bugging the hotel suite with sound equipment.
It goes without saying that excerpts from all these activities are regularly posted on YouTube, the better for Matt’s circle of friends to have a good laugh at his expense. Things get especially gruesome when Nicole has an unfaithful moment at a frat party and Matt hears about it.
Well, of course. Doesn’t everybody treat the loss of virginity as a communal joke-fest that trivializes the intimacy of the rite of passage?
Crammed with repellent people and not-especially-funny jokes, “The Virginity Hit” has crassness unusual even for the teen-sex genre. Especially annoying is that it wants us to ponder the more serious consequences of these days we live in, this Internet age with its lack of privacy and its many dangers lurking for the youth of our era.
To which I can only say lol, OMG and meh. A movie that trades in this much gross humor (and brings in a twist about Matt trying to lose his still-intact virginity to a porn star, who is played by an actual porn star) is not going to get away with sober assessments of life in the online era.
A subplot about Matt’s recovering-addict biological father might be sort of interesting in a different kind of movie, but here it just becomes a diversion — and, of course, one more thing for Matt’s friends to videotape and post online.
It’s impossible to care about these vapid characters, but that has nothing to do with the Internet age. The world had plenty of idiots doing dumb things before everything went online; “The Virginity Hit” merely plays variations on a rancid, age-old theme.
“The Virginity Hit” 1 star
Teenagers videotape the preparations of the last one in their midst to lose his virginity, a plan that has complications when his girlfriend has a moment of unfaithfulness. Shot in a faux-documentary style, the movie crassly brings its subject into the YouTube age, but its characters are so repellent that the Internet angle doesn’t really make much difference.
Rated: R for nudity, language, subject matter
Showing: Meridian
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