College
January 14, 2009 by Mandy Kilinskis
Filed under DVD
What happens when you add one part Napoleon Dynamite, three parts Superbad, a pinch of American Pie, and then let the mix overcook to the point of being inedible? You get the movie College.
College is an uninspired, cliché movie about three high school friends going to a local university on a college visit weekend. Right before the trip, Kevin (Drake Bell) is dumped by his girlfriend. Her reasoning? He’s lame. Obviously then, he must regain his coolness by going to college for the weekend.
The boys are on campus for less than an hour when disaster strikes: the dorm room they were assigned to stay in for the weekend belongs to a guy that seems to like animals. A lot. So they wander down the road to a fraternity and beg for some lodgings. The fraternity members are, of course, polite to their faces, but immediately start scheming on how to ruin the boys’ weekend.
That night, the boys go through typical initiation – including body shots off the hairiest male member of the fraternity – but they happen to all meet a nice college girl in the process. More pranks ensue; the girls find out that they are still in high school; and they have a nice big angsty fight. As expected, though, everything turns out just fine in the end.
The worst part about the movie has to be its blatant attempt to be Superbad 2, and its miserable failure to do so. The three stars (Drake Bell, Andrew Caldwell, and Kevin Covais) are placed into their respective categories of normal, overweight obnoxious, and nerd. Caldwell’s character of Carter tries so hard to mimic Jonah Hill’s Seth, but instead of the ridiculous funny that we loved in Superbad, Carter just comes off as annoying and desperate. Covais’ character cannot hold a candle to McLovin, and Drake Bell is just a slightly hotter but less funny version of Michael Cera.
I should have been tipped off about the poor quality of this movie by the fact that it barely showed in theatres, it tops “Worst Movies of 2008” lists, and it has an unrated version. But only seconds into the credits, I knew that I was doomed. The opening credits were quite obviously inspired by the opening credits for Napoleon Dynamite, integrating the names of the production staff into normal objects. But they just tried a little too hard, and I was grumbling about the movie ripping off Napoleon Dynamite before even learning a character name.
Despite its failings in plot and originality, once you move past the fact that this is one of the most awful movies you will ever see in your life, you (begrudgingly) find yourself rooting for Kevin and his friends, and a random cameo by Verne Troyer is icing on this cake of ridiculousness.
The DVD comes with trailers and a gag reel, but after 94 minutes of a gag reel-turned-movie, I could not bring myself to watch it.
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