The Virginity Hit

TedFlicks Rating:

$9.00 ticket on a scale of $0 to $13.50.

There is something utterly farcically Shakespearian about the new teen-exploitation comedy, “The Virginity Hit,” which features a fairly good cast of no-names and porn star, Sunny Leone, as herself.  It’s an auspicious feature directorial debut for helmer/scribe Huck Botko who shares credit with Andrew Gurland.  Thanks to the no-name cast and a plot device which centers on YouTube, it is unlikely that “The Virginity Hit” would have distribution without Will Ferrell on board as a producer.  Botko & Gurland should be grateful that the planets aligned in their favor.  So should auds.

Title is a gag.  Virginity has not become “in” no matter what Sarah Palin says.  Four virginal high-school freshmen in New Orleans get a bong, which is shaped like a full-breasted woman, and pledge to take a hit of it only to celebrate losing their virginity.  Three of them celebrate within a matter of weeks.  Plot centers on the adventures of the fourth, Matt (Matt Bennett), an indecisive, socially inept geek, who makes it to his senior year with baggage intact despite a long-term relationship with Nicole, the rather stunning Nicole Weaver who seems to be a tad out of Matt’s league.

A note about the players:  Sharp-eyed readers will have noticed that the actors’ first names and those of the characters they play are the same.  Pic employs this convention for almost all cast members.  Maybe it saved on paperwork.

If it weren’t as funny as it is, “The Virginity Hit” would be as much a commercial for YouTube as “Sex and the City 2” is for Abu Dhabi Tourism.  Instead, pic, set in New Orleans, where it was shot on location, neatly integrates the highlights of the post-Katrina Big Easy while poking fun at Americans’ obsession with online video.

In pic’s world, everyone is videotaping everyone else.  The four boys are completely hung up on it.  They post the most embarrassing stuff about each other on YouTube and in a McLuhan-esque way become notorious for their screw-ups.  Plot has more twists and turns than a back road in Pound Ridge, NY packed into its roughly 90 minute run time.  Geek meets girl.  Geek gets girl.  Geek loses girl.  Will he get her back?  Will he lose his baggage?  Does she lose hers before he does, if he ever does?  It could have been a “Jerry Springer” episode.

Enough dithering, Hamlet!  Matt’s three friends make it their mission to get Matt laid.  His first outing with Nicole ends up in failure to rise to the occasion.  Another outing, bugged and videotaped by the gang of three and their girlfriends in a classy New Orleans hotel, goes south when Nicole catches on to the bugging.  Matt agreed to it only because he believed the rumor that she had lost her baggage to a frat boy.  That didn’t stop him from being tossed into the rose bushes by her angry dad, David Jensen, who develops a violent streak regarding the hapless geek.  Jealousy, as a wise girlfriend once told your critic, is a totally useless emotion…unless one is making a comedy.  The rose bush incident becomes a hit on YouTube.  It attracts a woman, who calls herself “Becca” (Savannah Welch) who posts a video offering her experienced, 25-year-old bod to Matt.  It seems to be too good to be true…and it is.  They hook up, and she sucker-punches him, taping his every move as she abandons his underwear-clad skinny body in order to prove for a graduate thesis how simple men are to manipulate.  She could have picked on a man instead of a boy, but still, she posts the shameful video on YouTube, revealing both her real identity and intent.  Matt is now the poster boy for intact teenagers in need of St. Jude.

The next scheme, hatched by the gang of three, is to hook Matt up with his obsession, porn star Sunny Leone.  For this they must come up with Sunny’s price.  The fundraising includes boys dressed as Santa Claus and bikini car-washes.  In a sort of “This Is Your Life” stunt, they bring the depressed Matt to one of Sunny’s New Orleans appearances.  The geek is galvanized.  Sunny, BTW, has an extraordinary figure.  There is no mistaking her for a boy, although it appears that her generous mammaries are doctor-enhanced.  While Sunny welches on the deal, a pivotal event ensues, which sets up pic’s denouement.

To the credit of the young cast, they are up both to the physical comedy and the farce.  It’s not exactly Feydeau, with doors opening and closing just in the nick of time, but the gags are broad, tightly filmed (Luke Geissbuhler), well cut (Geoffrey Richman), and well acted, and they come one right after another.

Topping the foregoing for a climactic ending is next to impossible, but cast and crew pull it off in a series of scenes which capture the spirit of the race to JFK Airport in the 1969 Jack Lemmon – Catherine Deneuve comedy, “The April Fools.”  That’s pretty heady company.

There are more than a few knocks, however.  The first reel is a tad weak.  The requisite teen vulgarity is present in spades, with nudity, language, and fairly explicit sexual situations giving pic an “R” MPAA rating, which means that it will have to appeal to the college crowd, not high school kids.  The premise is idiotic, but auds will overlook it due to superior execution.  Some of the alleged amateur video in the first few reels is tough to watch, but one eventually becomes accustomed to it.  Pic could be called the love child of “Paranormal Activity” and “Come Blow Your Horn” but all it owes to the former is the amateur video aspect.  Adults may be put off by the vulgarity and wonder in disbelief how so many unimpressive guys can get so lucky with such really hot chicks, but this is, after all, a teenage boy’s fantasy.

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