In Miss March, many things are possible. First, it is possible to go into a coma when, on the way to losing his virginity, a guy falls down a flight of stairs.
Secondly, it is completely plausible to wake from said four-year coma completely clean-shaven and ageless. And lastly, lesbians can open locked doors with their nimble and experienced tongues.
From Independent Film Channel sensations Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore comes Miss March, a story of a young innocent girl, who becomes a Playboy bunny after her boyfriend falls into a coma before consummating their relationship. After waking from his coma, Eugene Bell (Cregger) finds that he has been abandoned by everyone he knows, including his high school sweetheart Cindi, played by Raquel Alessi, who looks like she hasn’t seen a highschool classroom since stirrup pants were popular. The only person who has stayed by Eugene’s side is his sex-obsessed friend Tucker Cleigh (Moore), who looks even older than Cindi. Upon his awakening, Eugene finds that his angel has become a centerfold, calling for a cross-country road trip to the Playboy mansion in order to reclaim his love.
The usual road trip shenanigans then ensue. Someone falls asleep at the wheel; the two friends get in an argument. In fact, the entire movie is contrived in an all too familiar way. While the IFC skits from Cregger and Moore as ‘The Whitest Kids ‘U Know’ are chuckle worthy, Miss March barely elicits a grunt of amusement. The actors look uncomfortable on the big screen, often giving the impression that they are merely reciting lines during a sixth grade play, rather than actually acting.
The script also sounds recycled, but that’s because it is. Though Cregger and Moore take credit for the screenwriting, the initial idea came from FOX.
‘Someone had written the script with Trevor and I in mind,’ Cregger said. ‘It was a similar story. And they asked us if we wanted to rewrite it and direct it. They presented it to us, and said ‘take it and make it what you want completely.”
The movie ends rather predictably with all ends tied neatly in a knot and placed in a pretty little box that also contains a life lesson, of which the guys seem to be especially proud.
‘It absolutely does have a message and hopefully it’s not to hit you over the head with it,’ Cregger said. ‘In a nutshell, both of the characters have the same problem. Both of them are obsessed with sex in polar-opposite ways. It’s about how these two unhealthy ideas of sex need to be reigned in to some sort of reasonable middle ground.’
This is the first film for both Cregger and Moore and it painfully shows. The movie becomes absurd, and not in a witty and hilarious Judd Apatow-ic way, but in a ‘dude, I don’t know how to advance the plot, oh yeah let’s give him a drinking straw for a penis,’ type of way.
The majority of the jokes are cringe-worthy, but instead of squirming in uncomfortable delight at the actual joke, the audience is left cringing in sympathy at the actors for having to pull off such crass, humorless plot advancement.
Sympathy is especially felt for Craig Robinson, known mostly for playing Darryl on ‘The Office’ with hilariously subtle and sophisticated humor. Robinson should probably fire his agent, or whoever advised him that playing a character named Horsedick.MPEG was a good career move.
With various references to oral sex and frequent flashes of boobies, the movie is quite obviously aimed at the horny high school male percentage of the population. But in an industry where, since American Pie the comedic bar has been substantially raised, the tastes of the American public – yes, even high school boys, have matured so that Cregger and Moore, with their sex-fueled road-tripping flick are way behind the times.’
There is a ray of sunshine in the fact that both Cregger and Moore had at least the initial sense to smell a bad egg of a movie idea.
‘Initially we were not into the idea at all,’ Cregger said. ‘Because in our master plan, we did not see ourselves coming out of the gate with a road trip sex-romp type movie. We’re not really huge fans of that genre.’
And, after seeing this film, no one will be.
