Pigs
(2007/Sex Teen Comedy/THINKFilm)
Picture:
C+ Sound: C+ Extras: C- Film: C-
With
films like Superbad around, the
really, super awful teen sex comedies look all the worse and Karl Opellino’s Pigs (2007) is such a film, whose
failures are more obvious than many in the cycle and saddest of all, a little
more effort could have actually made more of this work.
A group
of guys are too busy keeping score with the women they are trying to make it
with and so bored with the situation that one bets the other he cannot make it
with 26 women who have the 26 different letters of the alphabet. At least they know how to spell.
The rest
of the film is about this goal and making certain there are enough proper
records of it to win from keeping score of the scores. Unfortunately, even with a dumb idea, this
could have been much funnier if the director knew how to direct, knew comic
timing, made the few funny lines work better so the audience would actually
laugh and do this with some energy.
Instead, everyone looks bored, like they arte reading from a script and
despite some pretty women cast, their characters are so badly underdeveloped
that we do not learn enough about them to make this the least bit realistic.
Running
85 minutes, there is so much more that could have been done in that time and
oh, are the would-be hit songs that nobody ever heard pathetic. This epitomizes the main problem in its
endless attempt to be hip instead of telling a story about real
characters. That adds up to a big missed
opportunity and offers many examples on how not to make this kind of story.
The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image originates on digital High Definition
video and looks it, with poor detail and a slight haziness throughout beyond
the stylized look of the flashback. The
Dolby Digital 5.1 mix tries to spread out the low budget sound, but to little
avail. When the bad songs fill the
speakers best, you know you are in trouble.
Extras include bonus scenes, bloopers, making of featurette, unrated auditions,
two more featurettes and a cast/crew audio commentary with odd results.
- Nicholas Sheffo
