As amoral as they come. Project X throws all caution to the wind to employ a quasi-documentary, found footage approach of a teenage bacchanal. With parents away from the weekend, the hapless boys are going to throw the biggest party their school has ever seen with hopes to – what else? – get laid. The extended party scene, with obligatory boob shots, smashed windows, a totaled car, and an obliterating use of a flamethrower, is chaotically amusing. I remember mini-versions of this party at my UCLA party crashing days. Every couple of hours, somebody from my buddy crew would belch out, “Let’s go get some, bitches!” These boys say that or something likewise every other sentence. The movie has an impulsive spirit, but is utterly witless.
The supremely obnoxious Costa (Oliver Cooper) uses the words dick and pussy every other sentence, too. He’s constructed all this chaos so his pal Thomas (Thomas Mann) can have the ultimate 17th birthday bash. The plan works so well to get him laid, that he nearly comes close to getting laid twice with two different girls. And anybody who has lived long enough should know you’re setting the bar too unrealistically high when you try to do that to the point you end up having nothing.
I don’t know about these boys, but when boys grow up and become real men you figure out you’re doing okay in the love game while all your chronically wasted friends are the ones not getting laid. Often, as the case here, dumb drunk boys are too out of it to get it up and score. As for the girls in this movie, there’s a hotness factor I suppose, but all of them are just sex objects with tepid minds. A real budding gentleman would find the un-drunk girl ready to banter with, seduce her mind, then drive her off far away from this party to a sex sanctuary/hideaway that she’d find cool. But on this neighborhood block? A thousand horny drunk dudes? Chances are miniscule to score if all in a cluster, and if they do have sex, will it be remembered the next day?
It would be nice to see a raunchfest someday that intermixes crude dialogue in with some smart ambitious dialogue, something that reflects the boys have life plans or at least read something, or have been somewhere in life that doesn’t revolve around sex 24/7. Still, it’s not impossible to see this as a guilty pleasure frat house movie when it hits DVD. Just so your drunken fraternity brothers know that eventually it’s time to grow out of these juvenile-slob habits if you’re really going to score.
87 Minutes. Rated R.
COMEDY / CRUDE HUMOR / WEEKEND VIEWING DEBAUCHERY
Film Cousins: “Porky’s” (1982); “Can’t Hardly Wait” (1998); “Superbad” (2007); “Cloverfield” (2008).
