Movie Review: The Virginity Hit

LITTLE ROCK — I know I shouldn’t like The Virginity Hit.

It is a crass and vulgar movie, reductive and frankly imitative of dozens of sub-Porkies high school sex comedies, Tom Green’s filmic oeuvre (there’s an overt homage to Freddy Got Fingered), thousands of humiliating consumer-shot You-Tube videos and even The Blair Witch Project. It is a gimmicky movie that at times is literally hard to watch - the shaky cinematography will cause some moviegoers to experience motion sickness.

Yet, the movie left me in good humor, and it amused me for most of its 89-minute running time.There are things that are very smart about it, and were there not pressing deadline concerns I would be tempted to write about the movie at length. It seems to be a genuinely frightening reflection of our times - a kind of St. Elmo’s Fire for the post-terrorist attack generation - and a remarkably savvy experiment in marketing.

It is, to use an old-fashioned term, a postmodern movie, a mock documentary shot largely by members of the cast on prosumer equipment and cell phones and presented via Internet videos. It dispenses with craft to present “raw” content and pretends to dither the borders between fiction and reality.Most of the cast members use their real names, and no doubt many of the scenes are improvised, and though there are detectable clues which announce the movie’s artificiality, I expect that - as there were with Blair Witch - there will be those who believe what they’re seeing is somehow “real.”

The movie is about - what else? - the quest of acool nerd named Matt (Matt Bennett) to lose his virginity. He is abetted in this pursuit by his friends, led by his adoptive brother Zack (Zack Pearlman), who reflexively document their lives on video. While the plot is predictable and derivative, the boys seem to have genuine affection for each other and, their relentless randiness aside, a sweet species of respect for the girls they objectify.

In other words, they’re pigs but they aren’t evil, and though some of their schemes seem unspeakably cruel, they live in a world where people expect to be regularly punked and “rickrolled.” In tone, it’s not far removed from Judd Apatow’s Superbad - the girls are a lot more attractive (in every sense of the word) than the young men pursuing them. There’s a kernel of kindness here, and even anawareness of life’s temporality.

Maybe I feel kindly toward the movie because, despite its superficial verisimilitude, it’s really not that difficult to see around the sides of it to the fun the filmmakers are obviously having. The film also has the advantage of being set in New Orleans, a city that’s often depicted in the movies but rarely as matter-of-factly as it is here.

You’d never mistake the landscape for Shermer, Ill. There’s a scene in the Quarter, a road trip into Acadiana and an elaborate sequence set in the (fabulous) Columns Hotel in the Garden District - where, probably not coincidentally, Louis Malle had Brooke Shields’ virginity auctioned off in his 1978 film Pretty Baby - that all provide a sense of place without the Treme-style romantic provincialism.

There’s no doubt that The Virginity Hit has low aims and will rightly appall parents, schoolteachers and all those who worry about the coarsening of our society. There’s at least one scene that is alarmingly disgusting. There’s no reason anyone need see it.

It’s a bad, bad movie. Just ignore it. For God’s sake don’t laugh at it.