Six months ago, I did something truly remarkable; I made it all the way to the end of Disaster Movie. And if you don’t think that’s an accomplishment on par with putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom, then you haven’t seen Disaster Movie. The heights of malicious, misanthropic, tortuous glee that movie reached were so dramatic, so rarefied, that I felt sure I was seeing the peak of an era before its inevitable decline. Surely no comedy would ever be this woefully awful or defiantly scatological again. Stupid me. I should have known better than to doubt my fellow Americans’ desire for shit jokes, and I should have known that a movie like Miss March was just around the corner. You know, we’re the country that gave the world jazz and abstract expressionism and Orson Welles. We invented basketball and hip-hop. Now we export adolescent comedy garbage and hope the world won’t notice. No wonder everyone hates us. The real shame here is that the premise of Miss March really isn’t bad. A high schooler who has dedicated his life to teaching kids the value of sexual abstinence is finally ready to lose his virginity with his girlfriend on prom night. To calm his preshow performance anxiety he downs a few shots of liquor, goes crashing through the wrong door, falls down the stairs, and ends up in a coma for four years, during which time his girlfriend has gone off to Hollywood and become a Playboy centerfold. When our hero awakes, he’s greeted by his porn-obsessed best friend, who convinces him to go on a cross-country road trip to Hugh Hefner’s mansion to reclaim his true love (or at least get laid). Real filmmakers could do something with a premise like that. You’ve got sexual repression flowering into sexual promiscuity, guilt twisting itself into curiosity, an id and a superego trapped in a car for 72 hours. Men and lust and homoeroticism and a road trip: What more could you ask for? Give this idea to Todd Solondz, Jeremy Davies, and Vince Vaughn, and let them go with it. Instead we get Cregger and Moore (who also co-wrote and -directed), two members of the Whitest Kids U’Know, a comedy team from New York that will make any reasonable person long for the wit of Mad TV. As the straight-man virgin, Cregger is almost entirely devoid of personality; as his hyperkinetic sidekick, Moore may have the most unlikable personality in movie history. Together they’re traffickers in the comedy of human degradation, mining every bit of feces, every splat of vomit, every bout of epilepsy, every atrophied muscle, every moment of personal humiliation in the desperate search for a laugh from the confused 13-year-old boy who dwells somewhere deep in the soul of every grown male. Whoever put a camera in their hands should be banned from Hollywood cocktail parties for life and his soul barred from heaven forever.
This article appears in March 20 • 2009.