date from hell
TEXT SONYA RINKUS
First things first: I did not see “Date Movie.” feedback
There was no English-language press screening, the go-to guys at Gorbushka came up empty-handed and my Internet stream is too spotty to download it. But rare is the occasion when a film is the subject of such widespread, yet unified, critical reviling. In place of element’s own review, here’s a pastiche of other people’s reactions to the Hollywood shame that is “Date Movie.” Spiritual father “Scary Movie” demonstrated that the cheap parody can be funny when done right, but “Date Movie” takes even this lowbrow genre to unprecedented levels of stupidity. According to The Coast’s Mark Palermo, the driving premise behind this production must have been \"What’s the dumbest movie we can sell to the dumbest people on the planet?” Presenting eighty minutes of romantic comedy spoofs loosely clinging to a plot, “[‘Date Movie’ is] the kind of brutally painful movie-going experience generally associated with the lesser efforts of Rob Schneider,” (Ken Hanke, Mountain Xpress). Even the Movie Mom at Yahoo! thought it scraped the bottom of the barrel — “[It’s] a year’s worth of In Touch magazine thrown into a blender with some crotch humor”— and she’s hardly James Lipton. But does it come full circle? Is it a movie so absurdly bad that’s it’s become good, the way Sergei Zverev is so gay that he’s straight? No. “The year is still young, but don’t be surprised if ‘Date Movie’ is the worst film of 2006,” writes James Stanford of the Kalamazoo Gazette. Do you understand what this means? Even worse than February’s epic cinematic diarrhea, “BloodRayne!” Its profound humorlessness may even trounce the Irish Embassy’s for investigating our writers after the St. Patty’s issue. Now you’ve been warned, go on this date with extreme trepidation. God forbid you crack a smile, ain’t no hot shower gonna wash away that day-after shame. |
