Good news for any filmmakers who are working on a new teen sex comedy. No matter how dismal your script is, how bad your actors are or how much Jim Beam your cinematographer drinks before noon everyday, you’re probably still going to make a movie that’s better than Hooking Up. I have seen the bottom of the well—and Corey Feldman is there banging high school girls.
The story is the usual stuff, but this time made on bad, “let’s just shoot this thing and get it over with” digital video. The boys are trying to get laid, the girls are trying to preserve a little dignity, no one knows what they’re doing and everyone’s got lime Jello for brains. There’s nothing wrong with that. Seen it before, gonna see it again. A charming cast, outrageous jokes and an overall breeziness are what save the day in these movies. At the least, some good old-fashioned gratuitous nudity can perk you up a bit.
Sadly, Hooking Up fucks it all up with characters you can barely tell apart, gags ripped off silly internet e-mail forwards from 1998 and a few strangely harsh turns in which Feldman, as a 25-old-superstud with a knack for getting invited to all the best teen parties, summons up his dark side as the awful cokehead boyfriend to an underage girl. Not a whole lot of clothes hit the floor, either. I’m talking Snooze City all around. When this film thinks it has a good joke, it repeats it three or four times. There’s also very little music, which makes most of the movie feel like it’s happening in a yawning vacuum of sadness.
To make it even more awkward, director Vincent Scordia shoots this in ultra widescreen so you can watch the world’s dullest sex scenes and lamest masturbation jokes in the same aspect ratio as Ben-Hur. There’s no way that American Pie Part 7 is worse than this.