For a silly sex comedy, “The Virginity Hit” feels weirdly troubled. The film’s writer-directors, Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, also wrote the recent mock-documentary horror movie “The Last Exorcism.” “The Virginity Hit,” made with a similar camcorder aesthetic, has horror-movie moments of its own. When a mysterious woman makes a sexual offer to Matt (Matt Bennett), our teenaged protagonist, in a YouTube video, we get deeper-and-deeper close-ups of the grainy video until her lips fill the frame. When Matt talks hopefully and awkwardly to this woman on the phone, standing by a motel pool at night, he is lit by an ominous blue-green glow. While Matt, some of his high-school buddies and his adoptive sister Krysta (Krysta Rodriguez) are on the road to meet the mysterious woman, everyone gets drunk at a party; Krysta and Matt start making out and retreat to a tent in the dark swamp outside. Matt’s adoptive brother, Zack (Zack Pearlman), normally a shameless goofball, goes stiff and bug-eyed when this happens; he starts talking in horrified tones about Matt’s “incest boner,” and he tramps out in the dark to forcibly separate the two.
Unfortunately, “The Virginity Hit” is not a horror movie about the dark possibilities of adolescent sexuality—though, remembering the last-minute plot reversal of “The Last Exorcism,” I kept hoping. Rather, it is a silly sex comedy about those dark possibilities, with a tone of ha-ha-boys-will-be-boys nostalgia. (The “incest boner” scene, for instance, was probably meant for laughs; the sense of fearful awe seems to occur by accident.) The movie’s title refers to hits from a special bong bought by Matt, Zack and a few other high school boys for the special purpose of commemorating each boy’s first time. This bong is shaped like a buxom woman; it too is a horror-movie image, red and bulbous. Zack trains his camcorder mockingly on it, zooming in on the huge breasts (snicker snicker). This fairly represents the film’s attitude toward the female body. The camera stays diligently in character: the horny adolescent’s eye, uncovering flesh wherever possible. Interestingly for the post-Judd Apatow era, while the movie shows female nudity without restraint, it observes a reverent obscurity as far as the penis is concerned. A scene in which Matt shaves his pubic hair is framed at a distance, with the genitals obscured by shaving cream and computerized blur (better safe than sorry).
Like Apatow’s sex comedies, this one tries to inject obviously sleazy scenarios with emotional sincerity. So we get a porn actress (Sunny Leone) kindly inviting Matt and friends backstage and advising them, “No matter how much you have sex, you can never f*** away the tears.” We also get a sweet reconciliation between Matt and his long-time girlfriend Nicole (Nicole Weaver), after Matt’s pathetic odyssey in search of cheaper intimacy. That’s sort of nice.
But even though Matt has gone back to Nicole, there is no real change. There is something weirdly innocent about these kids, and something weirdly cynical, but this is a shallow movie, with a rambling plot that never unlocks the weirdness. The kids go from awkward situation to crazy scheme to emotional interlude. Nothing really happens to them; they drift through pot smoke and college parties and funny hi-jinks.
The most disappointing thing is that sex doesn’t really mean anything in this movie, which is about sex. There’s no particular emphasis on the pleasure of sex, or the emotional bonding of sex, or any of the things unique to the bodily intercourse of two people. Instead, we linger on the adolescent boy’s sense of self-satisfied accomplishment. “Yeah dude, I banged her.” The movie ends as it begins, with the boys gathered smugly around the woman-shaped bong, girls draped over the boys, smiling, sucking in the smoke.
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