Miss March

Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore are the creators, writers, directors, and stars of a TV sketch show called The Whitest Kids U Know. I've not seen this show, nor have I even heard of it before I did a small bit of research on these two guys. They are now the creators, writers, directors, and stars of a movie called Miss March. I have seen this movie, and believe me, I wish I hadn't. While not completely unwatchable and certainly a step up from the last teen sex farce I endured (Fired Up), you get the sense while watching it that these guys have no idea what to do when it comes to movies.

Cregger and Moore play teenage best friends named Eugene and Tucker, respectively. As is the unwritten rule in the teen sex comedy, Eugene is the straight arrow "nice guy", and Tucker is the wild, sex-crazed "party guy". Tucker's world seems to revolve solely around women and Playboy magazine, which is his main obsession in life. (You'd think the guy would catch up with the rest of the world and discover Internet porn by now.) As for Eugene, he has a sweet girlfriend named Cindi (Raquel Alessi), and the two travel around to different middle schools, preaching abstinence to preteens and "scaring them straight" by showing them graphic photos of sexual diseases. Prom Night is approaching, and Cindi seems to be ready to break her vow of abstinence. To prepare himself for sex, Eugene gets drunk and winds up falling down the basement stairs, where he is knocked on the head by a falling toolkit and sent into a coma.

Four years later, Eugene is awakened in his hospital room with a wack on the head from a baseball bat by Tucker. Everything's changed for Eugene since that fateful night. His dad's gone on with his life, abandoning him, and Cindi is gone also. Tucker soon discovers what Cindi has been doing with her life when he cracks open his latest issue of Playboy, and discovers that she's the current month's centerfold. Wanting to know what has led the girl he loved to this, Eugene escapes from the hospital with Tucker's help, and the two begin a cross country journey to the Playboy Mansion. The remainder of the film follows the standard teen sex road trip comedy formula, only with none of the inspiration and an overall feeling of "been there, done that". The two guys encounter the expected oddballs on their journey, including a former classmate turned rapper named Horsedick.MPEG (Craig Robinson), some very horny lesbians, and an army of disgruntled firefighters who are chasing after Tucker cross country, because they've been sent by his psychotic girlfriend (Molly Stanton), who wants to kill him after he stabbed her with a fork repeatedly while they were having sex. (It's a long story.)

At the very least, Miss March has the balls to embrace its R-rating. After the PG-13 Fired Up and The House Bunny (another Playboy-themed movie which oddly seemed to be targeting preteen girls), I was kind of looking forward to an all-out raunch comedy. Unfortunately, the best thing that the screenplay by Cregger and Moore can come up with is a running gag concerning the fact that Eugene can't control his bowel movements after being in a coma so long, so he keeps on letting the brown stuff fly at the worst times (accompanied by exaggerated cartoon-style fart sound effects that blast on the theater speakers). Another running gag is the name of their rapper friend who they hitch a ride with briefly on their adventure. As I mentioned, his name is Horsedick.MPEG, and the movie seems to think it's so funny, the characters keep on saying his name in almost every line of dialogue when he's around. I tried to count how many times his name was spoken in one scene, and lost count somewhere after 13. Funny names are seldom funny to begin with, and when you cram said name down your audience's throat, not only does it become less funny, it starts to lose all meaning.

Aside from a scene that shows us why it's never a good idea to use a strobe light when you're having sex with a girl who suffers from epilepsy, the humor in this movie seems tired and generic. It's like Cregger and Moore were lost as to how to fill 90 minutes of material, so they just decided to do some half-assed recreations of scenes from better road trip comedies. To be fair, the two guys do have a certain chemistry on screen with each other, but they bring nothing to their individual characters. Cregger is dull as the "straight man" of the duo, and never really gets to do or say anything funny. He's there mainly to shake his head at the antics of "goofy" Tucker who, judging by Moore's performance here, thinks bugging his eyes out when he talks is the funniest thing in the world. They're surrounded by a supporting cast who seem game, but aren't given anything to do. In particular, Molly Stanton always seems close to hitting on something as the girl trying to hunt down and kill Tucker, but the movie doesn't know what to do with her and wastes her potential in nearly every scene.

Watching Miss March, I wanted to pay a personal visit to Cregger and Moore, sit them down, and make them watch a teen sex road trip comedy that came out a few months ago called Sex Drive. That was obviously the kind of movie they were trying to make here, and that film did everything right that they do wrong. This is a charmless and witless comedy that is not confident enough in itself to be funny. Given the filmmakers' experience in TV sketch comedy, maybe it's no surprise that the film resembles the worst Saturday Night Live movie you can remember.

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