If 17 minutes of padding lops a rating point off its . . .

Rating: 7/10 (16 November 2014)

. . . theatrical release, dropping THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN from an "8" down to just a "7," how many MORE minutes of boring outtakes would be needed to push VIRGIN below "5" territory? Less than half an hour, I'd wager, as the quality of each scrap scraped off the cutting room floor and spliced back into this "Unrated" Extended Edition is by definition lower than the previous remnant. Soon the flavor of the original humor becomes so diluted by the third- and fourth-string ad libs and other pap that the viewer begins to wonder how they ever were able to stomach this increasingly thin gruel in the first place. Good film editors always have operated on the theory that "less is more." If GONE WITH THE WIND had "Picturized" Margaret Mitchell's entire novel, Scarlett O'Hara would have had a lot more kids underfoot, theater managers would have needed another intermission or two for the sake of maintaining dry seats, and the resulting eight-hour epic would be as forgotten today as Erich Von Stroheim's GREED. As a miniseries, VIRGIN leaves a lot to be desired.