March 13, 2009
Teen sex comedy worth Missing
By LIZ BRAUN - Sun Media

As far as we can figure, Miss March is a film about bodily functions.

There is a plot -- it involves a high school student who wakes up from a lengthy coma and discovers his innocent girlfriend has become a Playboy bunny -- but that's not really what the film is about.

Miss March appears to be a simple exercise in grossing out the audience, a winning box-office strategy for any teen comedy.

Sadly, it's all so deliberate here that the laughs are few and far between.

The visual jokes run to explosive diarrhea, sex-starved lesbians and dogs peeing into cocktails.

So perhaps it's hilarious when one of the characters gets bitten during oral sex because his epileptic girlfriend has a seizure.


But for him to then stab her in the head with a fork?

That's just gilding the lily.

Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, part of the New York based comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U' Know, created Miss March and also star in the movie as lifelong best friends.

Moore's character, Tucker, is a sex-crazed idiot; it's Cregger's character, Eugene, who gets hit on the head and wakes up four years later.

Poor Eugene is still a virgin, having missed his chance for sex at the prom.

Guess a coma will do that to you.

Anyway, once awake from his unconscious state, Eugene discovers that in those missing four years, his formerly innocent high school girlfriend (Raquel Alessi) somehow grew up to be a Playboy centrefold.

The guys decide to seek her out and find out how all this happened.

They call upon an old friend from high school, now a famous rapper (Craig Robinson, whose scatological hip-hop shtick is actually pretty funny) to help them get to a party at the Playboy Mansion.

Eugene is determined to find his old girlfriend and find out why her life changed the way it did.

At the mansion, the guys even run into their idol, Hugh Hefner, and have an important conversation about women.

Hefner's acting ability is right up there with his sex appeal, we must say.

Miss March is a combo of sex jokes and various crises, with our heroes going through the requisite number of pratfalls and sitcom complications.

Moore's character, Tucker, is all comic exaggeration in that Three Stooges kind of way, while Cregger plays Eugene as the calm straight man.

Trouble is, the two never entirely mesh or seem to work as a team, and that leaves the actors looking as if they're in two different movies.

At the same time.

Not funny enough

You can see the problem.

The shock factor doesn't work without enough humour to hold the pieces together.

If there's a target audience for Miss March, we suspect it would involve people aged around 14, who are male and perhaps stoned.

All others: You were warned.

(This film is rated 14-A)