THE VIRGINITY HIT By Gary Murray Starring Matt Bennett and Zack Pearlman Written and directed by Andrew Gurland & Huck Botko MPAA Rating R Running time 105 min Selig Film Rating Forget it! Even though drama gets all the respect, most people know that it is much harder to make a comedy. While there are easy ways to draw out the emotions of moroseness, it is more difficult to get a solid laugh. Humor is subjective and what makes someone laugh makes others wince. Such is the case with The Virginity Hit. The story is shot with that bouncing camera, faux documentary feel. Four high school buddies in The Big Easy buy a very special bong. They instantly decide that they will only toke on it when each loses their virginity. Three of them pass the test to manhood with ease, hitting on the sacred pipe within a few months of each other. The final guy is Matt (Matt Bennett) a nebbish guy with a 'too hot for him' girlfriend. The two are very much in love and have finally decided to give their virginity to each other. Matt makes all these plans and his best buddy Zack (Zack Pearlman) decides to film the entire proceedings. Zack dreams of becoming a film-maker, posting all of his life on U-Tube. As the big day approaches, Matt finds out that his beloved is not as pure as once thought. He is crushed but is talked into going through the proceedings by Zack. The plan is to film everything with all their buddies and cameras in very close proximity. The only person who doesn't know the actual deed it to be filmed is the gal pal. The falling out of everything that happens to Matt gets on the Internet, which depresses him even more. People from around the world comment on his failure. But an older woman contacts him and says that she will relieve him of the scarlet V. He just has to jump through a bunch of hoops before he gets to jump in the sack. The film follows Matt as he goes deeper and deeper down the path of desperation just to get his groove on. This involves humilitation, porn stars and bowel movements. The more the comedy unfurls, the more one realizes that Matt has a horrible life, never good for a comedy. As his back story is revealed, we find that Matt is orphaned. His mother died of cancer and his father is a drug addict who abandoned him. He lives at Zack's house but never really feels a part of the family. His nest egg of college savings becomes another downtrodden plot point. This is a sad existence where pain and tragedy do not build a solid foundation for a rachous comedy Zack Pearlman seems to be channelling Jonah Hill, giving a reading that is more of a copycat than a different character. He's such a blowhard, an unsympathic person, one has to wonder why anyone would be his friend. He has no humanity, callow to a degree one only sees in villians. Instead of helping Matt who is almost like a brother, he basically destroys the young man, just for internet fame. Zack is the worst kind of friend one could ever have. The depiction of women in the film is appalling. They are all whores or on the road to becoming one. None of them have any personalities, just fun meat for the boys to gnaw on. Women are degraded, shown more as recepticals than people. Since most of the kids in the film are supposed to be kids, the entire exercise dances around the precepts of child pornography and pedophilia. There is not a redeaming feature in any of the male characters. All they do is get drunk and get high, oblivious to the consequences of their actions. Even in the films they are trying to hark back to, the B-grade raunch fest comedies from the 1980's (Screwballs, Porky's, The Last American Virgin and Joy Stick), there were elements of humanity in those scripts. The world of The Virginity Hit has no morals much less a moral compass. The college kids will find this hilarious, but it is a weak entree in the new birth of the raunchy teen sex comedy that filled the drive-in decades ago. The film is produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, two guys who are very successful and who should know better about the products they attach themselves to. If one wants to see this kind of flick, there are much better films than The Virginity Hit.
