College

College is a worthless movie. It's not the worst of the year - off the top of my head The Happening and The X-Files: I Want to Believe are both worse - but it's a lukewarm Animal House / Revenge of the Nerds wannabe leaning on halfhearted jokes and performances cobbled together to an end result that had no business anywhere except straight-to-DVD.

In fact, it's actually a little worse than the straight-to-DVD American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile (yeah, I Netflixed all the American Pie Presents movies, what of it?), with which it shares a structurally identical plot: three high school kids go on a college visit and have a wild and zany weekend! There's a bunch of gross-out / sex gags and a moderate amount of female nudity. In the end our heroes achieve their goals and there's a "we learned something" moral tacked on. And that's it. The Naked Mile was unfathomably dumb, yes, but it at least had a bit of a pulse and didn't feel so unpleasantly grimy.

College has a Revenge of the Nerds framing device as an evil fraternity terrorizes our heroes, and in the end they get their extremely juvenile revenge on the evil frat by putting superglue on their toilet seats, giving pigs laxatives and having them shit all over the frat house, setting off the water sprinklers, and three or four other acts of vandalism that in the real world would just get you arrested. But in this movie this means they have now defeated the evil frat, the evil frat leader is hauled off by the police (?!), and some hot college chicks inexplicably have sex with the good guys and I'm left gaping at the screen wondering what the fuck I just watched.

That's not to deny there are two or three laughs, but that's only because I'm a borderline-retarded member of the unwashed proletariat and generic gross-out gags involving shit and cum make me laugh. The movie also coins the term "scrotum-eating baby rapists" as an insult, which may have been my one legitimate bellow of from-the-gut-laughter the whole hour and a half. But by and large it's a tired, bloated, exhausting waste of time and makes me look back on The House Bunny as vibrant and likable.

HOWEVER, I have one further note. I must call out America's film critics on lazy journalism. I won't defend one frame of the eye-rollingly derivative College as being original, but it seems like every other review accused it of being a Superbad ripoff, presumably because there are three leads, one of whom is shy and well-meaning, one of whom is vulgar, and one of whom is a nerd. It's similar, yes, but it took me all of two minutes of research to find out that College was shot in March of 2007. Superbad was released in August of 2007.

Again, not defending the movie, it's a piece of shit, but it's just flat-out impossible for it to be a Superbad ripoff if you look at the dates and if it's your only job to watch and journalize film you should have the integrity to do it well and research and accurately report on every film whether good or bad. Okay, stepping off soapbox now.


1 Star out of 5