Review: Miss March

Up until yesterday I was having trouble keeping track of all the movies that were contenders for the worst of 2009, and I couldn't decide which one topped the list. Now my head is clear of such decisions. I've seen Miss March. In the film, high school boy Eugene (Zach Cregger) practices abstinence but reluctantly agrees to sleep with his girlfriend Cindi (Raquel Alessi) on prom night. Before he can seal the deal he falls down some stairs and goes into a coma. When he wakes up four years later, Cindi is the new Playboy Centerfold. So he and his idiot best friend Tucker (Trevor Moore) take a road trip to the Playboy Mansion to find her.

How they're friends is one of the movie's greatest mysteries, aside from, you know, the one about how it ever got made. These two morons react to everything with bug eyes and jaws agape, sometimes comically screaming and sometimes not. Cregger is a self-righteous, hypocrite prig, and Moore does a barrel-scraping Jim Carrey impersonation that comes much closer to Jim Varney; he even makes those old "Strip-O-Rama" comedians look elegant and refined. (These two cretins are the co-creators of a TV show called "The Whitest Kids U Know," which I am proud to say I have not seen.)

Miss March operates mainly on a crippling fear of human sexuality, female sexuality, females in general, black people, lesbians and just about everything else. Nothing in the film resembles any genuine human behavior or emotions. Eugene's abstinence comes from his brother's experience, catching an STD and getting a girl pregnant his very first time having sex. But clearly he's hung up on sex regardless of that experience (which we only hear about in a monologue).

Tucker hits on everything that moves, has based his life on Playboy Magazine and talks about sex all the time in a consistently "awesome" tone, which pretty much proves that he has hang-ups as well. His current longtime girlfriend is Candace (Molly Stanton), who has epilepsy. While going down on Tucker, he flicks on a strobe light, causing an attack during which she -- ahem -- bites down. In response, he stabs her in the face with a fork. Candace goes on the rampage, calling in her firefighter brother to help. "Everyone hates firefighters," Tucker screams. "They're crazy." Huh?

A third character, a black rapper called Horsedick.MPEG (Craig Robinson) also brags about his sexual prowess -- in his songs and in life -- but the movie ends his reign by showing that he actually has no penis. (The white kids literally castrate the threatening black man.) Then we get the hot lesbian couple, who insist on kissing and having sex in front of the disbelieving heroes; these are all clear-cut cases of the imbeciles laughing off the fear of that which they can't understand.

Don't forget the requisite pee and poo jokes, which are the only ones the so-called "filmmakers" can really relate to. When Eugene wakes up from his coma, his body has atrophied; he needs physical therapy and he needs to learn how to work his bowel muscles again. But, unfortunately, though he learns to walk and run in just two days, his bowel condition continues, and he drops a load somewhere just about every ten minutes. As for urine jokes, how about a dog peeing in a playmate's champagne glass, followed by her taking a big swig? Hilarious, no?

For a movie officially endorsed by Playboy and tagged with an R rating, Miss March has pathetically little actual nudity or titillation, not surprising given the movie's "tee-hee" attitude toward those subjects. Most of the female nudity comes from Horsedick's (black) groupies and music video dancers. (Are the white girls too "pure" to pose nude?) The actual centerfold photo has Cindi lying on a bed with her arms draped over her "naughty" bits. Real Playboy readers would be nonplussed. Nor is there any action at the big Playboy Mansion party; all the girls are scantily, but tastefully clad. The 2007 Playmate of the Year Sara Jean Underwood appears as herself and makes a plea for animal rights (no kidding). You can almost picture her being more animated during her contract negotiation. Hugh Hefner also appears as himself, probably much to his regret.

This idea probably could have worked, but these same half-wits, who actually wrote and directed the movie as well, completely fail to shape or deliver even one joke. Stupid comedies can be great, but the secret is that they should be cheerfully stupid and not arrogantly stupid, like this one. The filmmakers emphasize shooting crap at the audience rather than actually having fun themselves. We here at Cinematical don't use rating scales like the one-to-four stars or the scale of 1-to-10, and I wouldn't usually give movies a "zero" rating, mainly because I can almost always find something worthwhile, either in a performance or some set decoration or something. But I can assure you that there's nothing worthwhile in Miss March.