Miss March (R) ½

Story

WHAT IT'S ABOUT?

Two childhood buddies are forever changed by their first encounter with Playboy magazine. The story picks up 10 years later, focusing on Tucker Cleigh, a sex-obsessed moron who beds every girl he meets, plus his conservative friend, Eugene Bell, who practices abstinence with his uptight girlfriend Cindi and joins her in teaching its virtues to younger students. But when Cindi decides she's ready to ''do it'' on prom night, Eugene nervously complies but gets drunk, falls down a flight of stairs and lands in a four-year coma. When he awakens, he discovers Cindi has become a nude Playboy centerfold and joins Tucker on a chaotic cross-country trip to get to the Playboy mansion where he hopes to find Cindi — and Tucker gets to live out his wildest playmate fantasies.

WHO'S IN IT?

Miss March exists as a comic vehicle for its ''stars,'' Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore, members of a Brooklyn comedy group whose TV show The Whitest Kids U Know ran for several seasons on IFC. The team also co-directs and writes this witless hodgepodge of gross-out gags, attempting to find humor in tasteless — not to mention sexist — setups. It makes last summer's The House Bunny look like Citizen Kane by comparison. Moore seems to be channeling early Jim Carrey as he plays a sex-crazed idiot who spends most of the movie trying to help his best friend (played by Cregger) lose his virginity despite an endless array of inanely conceived psychological and medical obstacles. With no one to rein them in, these writer/director/stars overplay to the extreme and go for the cheapest laughs imaginable. Trying to mine physical humor out of situations dealing from epileptic sex to uncontrolled bowels, this team throws it all at the wall but not much sticks. The rest of the cast including Raquel Alessi, Molly Stanton, 2007 Playmate of the Year Sara Jean Underwood and Craig Robinson — as an expletive-hurtling rapper named Horsedick.MPEG (in a gag repeated at least ten times) — are left twisting in the wind. Robinson, however, does get mileage out of a triple-X hardcore rap parody.

WHAT'S GOOD?

A scene where Eugene and Cindi try to teach sexual abstinence to a sparse audience of inattentive undergrads is amusing and well played. Unfortunately, it occurs in the first 10 minutes. After that, you're on your own.

WHAT'S BAD?

Just about everything else, including a dopey subplot involving a group of revenge-seeking firemen, desperate stunt-laden gags, egregiously over-the-top product placement for Playboy and one embarrassing scene after another designed to get the hardest R-rating possible.

MOST MEMORABLE LINE

Eight-two-year-old Playboy founder Hugh Hefner gets to offer this bon mot in his one-scene cameo: ''There's a bunny deep down inside every woman, and if you see that bunny, you're on to something.''

GO OUT AND GET POPCORN WHEN …

The opening credits start. Then, sneak into a better movie instead.

Acting

Direction

Bottom Line

Hollywood.com rated this film 1/2 star.