Wild Cherry

Oppressively routine from start to finish, Wild Cherry follows a trio of high schoolers (Tania Raymonde’s Helen, Rumer Willis’ Katlyn, and Kristin Cavallari’s Trish) as they discover that several football players have been keeping a “bang book” charting their sexual conquests – with the girls’ subsequent decision to deny their boyfriends sex triggering a series of juvenile and over-the-top interludes. Director Dana Lustig and screenwriter Chris Charney are clearly looking to put their own female-centric spin on American Pie, as the film, for the most part, features an ongoing emphasis on the protagonists’ raunchy exploits – with problems ensuing as it becomes clear that virtually none of the movie’s characters have been developed beyond their most superficial attributes. As such, the film’s admittedly talented cast is left floundering amidst a field of eye-rollingly unfunny gross-out gags and jokes – although Rob Schneider, of all people, does manage to deliver a surprisingly compelling (and subdued) performance as Helen’s concerned dad. The interminable atmosphere is exacerbated by the movie’s lamentable (and total) lack of laughs, with Lustig’s increasingly desperate efforts at wringing laughs from Charney’s puerile screenplay reflected in the film’s preponderance of aggressively obnoxious comedic set pieces (ie the girls are treated to a profanity-laced sex lesson from their freespirited teacher). And just when it seems as though things can’t possibly get any worse, Lustig offers up an astonishingly wrongheaded sequence in which several teenagers are accidentally served ice cubes made out of a pal’s semen – which effectively (and definitively) cements Wild Cherry‘s place as an irrelevant, flat-out worthless waste of time.

1/2* out of ****