Miss March

by Rick Grant

Grade: C Rated R
This derivative road comedy was conjured up by writing/producing team Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore who wrote and produced the IFC comedy series The Whitest Kids U Know. Obviously, this film is important to the fledgling filmmakers. It could make or break their careers. So, the pair is traveling in a Miss March coach to the various screenings to gauge its potential and appear live for a meet and greet at the end of the movie. They appeared at the Jacksonville screening last Monday night.
The scenario is a homage to the American Pie /There’s Something about Mary genre of young men coming of age and acting like juveniles. However, Cregger and Moore have added their original gags and framed them in the loss of time context. Cregger’s character, Eugene Bell falls down a flight of stairs at a party and is in a coma for four years.
This lost time device is the basis for the scenario. His girlfriend has left him and become a Playboy Centerfold (Miss March). His dad moved away, but his best friend Tucker Cleigh (Trevor Moore) visits him almost every day hoping he will wake up. Then one day, Tucker decides to use a radical method to jolt Eugene out of his coma. He smashes him in the face with a baseball bat. It worked. Eugene wakes up with atrophied muscles and no control of his bowels. (Cue gross poopie scene.)
The laughs range from cheap potty humor to a great parody of the decadence of rap. Tucker decides to drag his pal on a long distance road trip to attend the big bash at the Playboy Mansion, where Eugene’s girlfriend will be commingling. Of course, things go wrong and the gags keep coming. Some of the stunts are original, such as the girl being sucked out of a bus.
As the two hapless road warriors continue their journey, they meet up with an old friend, Horsedick.mpeg, an outrageous rapper whose raps offend everyone, but his sexist act catches on and makes him a star. Craig Robinson steals his scenes as the obnoxious rapper Horsedick.mpeg.
The entire road trip is leading up to the Playboy Mansion party. But, when Tucker drives a fork into his girlfriend’s forehead because she’s having an epileptic fit while having sex, she gets her brother, a mean-ass firefighter, to follow the nitwits to their destination to do grievous bodily harm to Tucker.
Clearly, Cregger and Moore were angling for commercial success by piecing together their screenplay with gags to which young college age men can relate. They did invent some original situations and stunts that stamp the work with their original writing skills. But it’s still sophomoric, pandering to the youth audience. To be fair, Fox did give them distribution and the filmmakers aim to please their benefactors so they can get financing for more films.
Basically, the scenario is of a genre or style of youth oriented films that titillates and entertains that demographic with plenty of bare breasts, butt shots, sexual content, and frat boy nonsense. There are lesbians having sex in the back seat, oral sex jokes, gross out setups, and the appeal of these two charismatic actors, whose diction and delivery were perfect. I could hear every word of the dialogue.
The bottom line: The picture delivers laughs which is its prime directive. So, Cregger and Moore have done their job and now wait for the moviegoers’ verdict.