Your first time is not always your best time. Perhaps the audience for The Virginity Hit, the new mockumentary by veterans of the genre Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, is not your local cinema on a Friday night. Arguably the film is best under the influence of something – in a dorm room on a Thursday night. It would explain the thin character development that launches us into comic situations without the contextualization of knowing these characters. Therefore they are not as funny as they might have been.
The film plays like a string of You Tube clips posted: essentially four friends share a sacred bong, once each looses their virginity, a celebratory toke is had. The last is the geekiest (ironically dating the hottest girl in the group), Matt (played by Matt Bennett. Matt is the adopted after his mother passes away, and his recovering drug addict father steals his college fund. A scene in which Matt confronts his father is one of the sharpest.
The film has its moments, but falls flat with the ultimate lack of character development. What is gained in telling a story in this format is truth, unfortunately very little is contextualized for us earlier, leading to moments that feel real without giving us a reason to care. The act of making a documentary can be a parasitic one; here we have an unreliable mediator, Zack.
Like Brian Depalma’s Redacted, the story mediated through several lens including a graduate student who runs a cruel study that was probably not approved by her university’s human experimental control board. The problem is the film gives us no reason to care – barely using its location, New Orleans.
Botko and Gurland previous mockumentary was the hilarious Mail Order Wife, in which Gurland documents his chubby best friend’s marriage to a mail order bride. There, a professional “filmmaker” exploited a bizarre and cleverly observed situation. There are no strangers to social experiments; earlier in his career Botch’s “dessertumentary” cycle had him serve desserts baked in spit and semen to his family.
Not much daring or awfully funny occurs in The Virginity Hit aside from a few chuckles. It is not mean enough, funny enough or honest enough to be effective, in fact this is the type of film a 16 year old might make and post on YouTube, where at least you can surf around for better content.
4 out of 10