The latest aggregators of lowbrow comedy, writing-directing-acting team Trevor Moore and Zach Cregger, have made their first movie.
The founders of a New York-based sketch comedy troupe were involved at several key levels of production of the spastic comedy Miss March, due out in theaters March 13.
The film is literally a pale version of The Whitest Kids U' Know, the troupe's offbeat-humor sketch show on the Independent Film Channel. The troupe's debut film Miss March instead demonstrates a poor grasp of joke setup and artistic nuance -- gags about epilepsy and uncontrollable feces are overacted to the point of repulsion.
There's no doubt they're having fun, but a disparity bridges the filmmakers from an audience familiar with the superior source material that has influenced it.
In the film, high school student Eugene wakes up from a four-year coma to find out his innocent girlfriend has since become a centerfold model in Playboy magazine.
His sex-obsessed, Hawaiian-shirt-loving best friend, Tucker, yanks him from his hospital bed so they can travel across the country to a party at the Playboy Mansion to find her.
The extreme slapstick is good in small doses, such as when Tucker wakes up Eugene from the coma by beating his head with a baseball bat.
The over-the-top mayhem of their road trip exacerbated by axe-throwing firemen occasionally sparks laughs.
The duo, which has a real-life best-friends chemistry, is adequate as classic foils. They react to almost everything with an open-mouthed gape. Cregger as Eugene appears to be imitating Ryan Reynolds whether he knows it or not, and Moore's Tucker is an offshoot of a stock sitcom character reject and early-to-mid-'90s Jim Carrey.
Some skits in The Whitest Kids U' Know achieve in three minutes what Miss March strives for wholeheartedly during its entire running time.
The group draws inspiration from grunge-era sketch shows The Kids in the Hall and The State, especially for its employment of cross-dressing. Miss March, however, sets its sights much lower by incorporating a soufflé of plot elements lurking in National Lampoon's straight-to-DVD fraternity fare.
The final third of the film, which takes place at the Playboy Mansion and features an all-too-obvious cameo, feels stale and forceful in creating dramatic tension.
Cregger and Moore poured a lot of their resources into this film, and with major studio backing, it's like they don't know when to say when.
It's apparent these guys are adjusting from directing TV to directing film because some scenes are shot too close to the leads. For example, Tucker and Eugene stand in a front of the camera talking while at a party while the viewer just waits for them to break the fourth wall.
Fans of The Whitest Kids U' Know will likely get more out of this than the average viewer because they have an idea of what they're getting.
Miss March's cavalcade of ideas the duo threw onscreen works in its favor to some degree. The film moves from one set piece to the next, so the escalation of chaos and throwing and hitting of objects keeps energy high -- funny or not.
When Eugene, after waking from his coma, walks into a hotel room, Tucker throws a backpack from across the room at Eugene's face, and the scene carries on from there.
The first hour's frenetic pace keeps it watchable, but not necessarily entertaining.
The guys' inclusive partnership is isolated to the other side of the table and their vision of sinister firemen in a bland sex farce doesn't quite make the creative leap.
Grade: C-
