Porky's Complaint

Rating: Null/10 (9 July 1999)

Some wonk at Universal woke up one Monday last August, went to his desk, picked up the phone and said, "Gimme SOMETHING ABOUT MARY for sixteen-year-olds"--and now we have this wedge of comic raunch, a schizoid vacillation between the WB-sweet and the Farrelly Brothers salty. It's a very bad and quizzically likable movie--endearing mostly for its talented cast, a group of game, fizzy youths you wish you were watching in something else. The movie lacks the guts of my favorite eighties horny-teen movie, Boaz Davidson's coarse and then strangely lachrymose LAST AMERICAN VIRGIN (1982), but even the cloying stuff feels heartfelt. The best performances: Eddie Kaye Thomas as a pint-sized version of Aaron Eckhart in a Neil LaBute movie; Chris Klein, reprising his saintly jock from ELECTION; and Natasha Lyonne, reprising her mouthy malcontent from SLUMS OF BEVERLY HILLS.