Welcome back,folks,for this special installment of Bad Movie Month that I like to call Sister's Choice-my sister Stephanie happens to have an August birthday(which was yesterday)so my blog gift to her is highlighting a bad film of her choosing.
Originally,we were going to tackle the Mark Harmon teacher comedy Summer School but unfortunately,that goof fest is not available for DVD viewing. So,our runner-up pick was Miss March,a 2009 comedy whose plot line is basically the J.Geils band hit song "My Angel is a Centerfold",with the main difference between them being the quality of the writing.
Miss March stars Trevor Moore and Zach Cregger,two of the main players in the comedy troupe,The Whitest Kids U Know. Since my sister and I are big fans of their skit show and have seen Whitest Kids perform live,our expectations for this movie were rather high but mine were quickly lowered upon seeing the trailer:
Zach plays Eugene,a high school senior eager to break his purity vows with his beloved good girl Cindi on prom night when a fall down the stairs puts him in a coma for four years. His wacky buddy Tucker(Trevor Moore)wakes him up with a baseball bat-so not kidding about that-and informs Eugene that Cindi is now a Playboy Bunny.
This leads to a road trip to the Playboy Mansion,with all sorts of supposedly zany adventures such as legions of firemen hunting down Tucker due to causing his epileptic girlfriend(whose brother is ,of course,a fireman) major bodily harm after an ill chosen love session using strobe lighting. I cringe just describing that last bit of business there.
This is the kind of movie where you think to yourself,"Why the hell is he/she is this thing in the first place?!". A good example is Craig Robinson,well known for his stint on the workplace sitcom The Office,who plays a rapper with a stage name that is too gross for me to write down but apparently the important part of his moniker is dot.MPEG(which becomes one of least vulgar running gags in this movie):
Some of you might be saying at this point,"Oh,come on,Lady T! Don't be such a prude,this is just a little gross-out humor,no big deal!" Hey,I'm no stranger to the gross-out,folks,but in order to work,the timing and the content have to be like Goldilocks's porridge and be presented just right.
From what I read online,this script was given to Cregger and Moore as a rewrite assignment that they mostly did for fun and then were offered a development deal that let them co-direct as well co-write. Also,the Playboy people were not involved at first and Robert Wagner was actually hired to play Hugh Hefner in a pivotal scene.
At some point,Playboy did get official included which did this movie no favors considering that Hugh Hefner received a Razzie nomination as Worst Supporting Actor that year for playing himself!:
What really makes Miss March so dreadful,apart from the obvious jokes that even a fifth grader could spot from a mile away and the pacing that stops and starts like a broken down car driven off a sleazy salesman's used auto lot,is that I know these guys can do better than this.
Sure,even the best comedians have their down moments and routines that may sound funny to them but horrible to everyone else(*cough* Daniel Tosh*cough),it's part of the art. However,the awkwardness onscreen here makes me think Cregger and Moore had to film this cinematic sludge under duress,as if John Malkovich from Con Air was standing behind the camera telling them "make a move and the bunny gets it!"
Miss March died a quick death at the box office and will hopefully not be too much of a blemish on either one of the WKUK member's careers. Trevor Moore has had a role on the short lived Fox series Breaking In and several film shorts on The Tonight Show as well as developing a Whitest Kids feature film. Zach Cregger has popped up on a couple of TV shows-Friends With Benefits and Guys With Kids and will probably be part of the WKUK movie,too.
Perhaps this abysmal flop of a farce taught the guys what not to do in making a motion picture since their online Whitest Kids' feature, The Civil War on Drugs, was a thousand times funnier and better than one second of Miss March,which a film critic rightly declared was worse than water-boarding.
So,maybe there is a hint of a silver lining around the dark cloud that is Miss March and when the day finally comes for the likes of Trevor Moore and Zach Cregger to truly conquer Hollywood,they'll have the right stuff. Tune in this Friday for my police report on Dragnet and in the mean time,don't overlook a good movie pitch when you hear one,even if it's from the new hire in the mail room:
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