The Virginity Hit
One and a half out of four stars
Rated: 18A
Recipe for boredom, and possibly despair: Take four affluent, horny and immature teens. Add a cheap video camera or three. Stir in dollops of cruelty, vulgarity and misguided parental consent.
The nasty result is The Virginity Hit, the best argument yet why YouTube novelties were never meant to run at feature length in theatres, or to be taken seriously.
It’s a charmless, sadistic and utterly soulless attempt to make a real-life version of such cherry-popping teen comedies as Superbad, Porky’s and American Pie, but the comparison does a disservice to those pictures. Closer analysis shows there’s really nothing real about it at all.
Four New Orleans teens — brothers Matt (Matt Bennett) and Zack (Zack Pearlman), and best friends Jacob (Jacob Davich) and Justin (Justin Kline) — make a bong-boosted pact to lose their virginity. The results will be documented by Flipcam clips posted directly to YouTube, with the sniggering Zack being the de facto director.
Everyone is quickly successful in their sex quests except for dweeby Matt, who looks as if he’s trying to ape Jay Baruchel’s character in She’s Out of My League. He just can’t seem to close the deal.
When it seems that Matt might implausibly finally score, with his out-of-his-league girlfriend Nicole (Nicole Weaver), he discovers that she’s been somewhat less than faithful to him.
Rather than talking things over with Nicole to get the truth, the lads proceed to set up a video sting operation aimed at humiliating her. If Matt can somehow get laid in the process, so much the better.
The ensuing rush of predictable gross-out gags ranges from documenting Matt’s first condom purchase to his humiliating experiences with an Internet hottie of dubious intentions. No intimate moment or bodily function is left unattended and no feelings are spared. Occasionally a parent will show up to do something witless.
None of this is original. Little of it is funny. All of it is shot in grainy video and shaky-cam, which could have you lurching in your popcorn or sprinting for the exits. It’s sad to think garbage like this gets released, when so many good movies languish on the shelves, looking for a distributor.
If this story were a genuine teen comedy, along the lines of Superbad and the rest, it might be merely OK. But it’s actually a con. It only pretends to be based on reality, adding another layer of exploitation to this sorry enterprise. The only thing real about it is the studio money and marketing behind it.
The film was written and directed by Andrew Gurland and Huck Botko, the pens behind the recent horror hit The Last Exorcism. If only we could hire an exorcist to stop the coming plague of movies like The Virginity Hit.
Peter Howell is a syndicated Toronto Star movie critic.