There’s nowhere near enough madness in “Miss March,” the latest alleged comedy from a cult fringe troupe—in this case the team of Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore (“The Whitest Kids U Know”)—to stink up the screen; and none of what is there is at all inspired. It’s appropriate that this raunchy, crude catastrophe is being released by Fox Atomic, because it’s a total bomb, worse than the worst movie ever adapted from a Saturday Night Live sketch. And that’s really saying something.
The starting point of the plot has a lot in common with “Kickin’ It Old Skool,” a 2007 Jamie Kennedy piece of junk: a high school loser has an accident that lands him in a coma, and after finally coming out of it he goes after the girl he loved despite the fact that she’s moved on with her life. Now I may not be the cleverest of script analyzers, but I think it’s safe to say that any movie that rips off Jamie Kennedy is bound to be bad. Probably the only choice worse would be stealing from Paulie Shore or Carrot Top.
But this time around the plot doesn’t degenerate into a terrible “Dance Fever” parody. Instead it’s content to become a terrible road comedy in which the destination is the Los Angeles Playboy Mansion where the girl in question (Raquel Alessi) has found a home as the titular bunny. Clean-cut Eugene (Cregger) is awoken from his four-year slumber by his goofy pal Tucker (Moore), and their off to California, pursued by Tucker’s enraged girlfriend (Molly Stanton) and her fireman brother (as well as all his colleagues on the force). They have a series of supposedly funny encounters along the way, first with Tucker’s friend Horsedick MPEG (Craig Robinson), a flamboyant hip-hopper, and then with a couple of lesbian Russians who give them a ride. Plenty of coarse jokes, even about epilepsy and muscle atrophy, as well as loads of potty humor follow.
There’s virtually nothing of interest here. Cregger is so bland that he makes Matthew Broderick look like a rebel, while Moore strains to be a young Jim Carrey but comes across more like a bargain-basement version of Matthew Lillard. Their script is composed mostly of dead air, which their limp direction merely accentuates. Alessi is wasted and Stanton humiliated, while Robinson plays broadly in the mistaken notion that his Horsedick is hilarious. Hugh Hefner shows up at the end, thereby elbowing aside Stan Lee for the Larry King Award for the biggest cameo whore in contemporary movies. Under the circumstances the fact that the picture is fairly well shot by Anthony B. Richmond seems a total waste of, if not talent, professionalism.
Maybe Fox thought that this “Miss”-fire could attract the same audience that made “Napoleon Dynamite” a runaway hit. But they’re “Miss”-taken. It’s early in the year, but this lamebrain fiasco is bound to be one of its worst movies.