Cynical Cinema

It’s a Boy Girl thing comes out tomorrow, June 24th, from Alliance Films. It’s a teen comedy with a familiar plot twist. The high school all-star quarterback and the really nerdy girl who lives next to him somehow switch bodies. And so now the nerdy girl learns all about being the football star, and the quarterback learns about being the nerdy girl, and they eventually fall in love with each other. Blah blah blah. These comedies are normally incredibly predictable, boring and painfully-PG. But there is good news here! This movie - is R-rated! There is nudity! And swearing! Maybe, just maybe, this one has a chance!

But NO! This is still the exact same movie as all the others. The smart chick who’s hotter than the head cheerleader, but no one sees it because she’s smart and nerdy and really into her grades and wants to go to Yale. The quarterback who can’t escape his destiny, the one who’s worried that this is all I’ll ever be! And even coming out of the mouths of people of different sexes, it’s still the same movie. And the hookup between the Shakespeare-reading hottie and the all-star athlete hottie at the end of the movie is the most painful cliche in high school teen comedies. I feel like screaming at the screen - Dude! It’s high school! You won’t be together for more than a year! It’s high school! This will not be the love of a lifetime here. You’re not going to get married. You are going to break up in college and sleep with everyone you meet. THAT is how this is going to work.

But the biggest sin this movie commits is not going all-out. It occupies some irritating middle ground between what could have been and what always is. If you’re going to show boobs and coarse language, and two hot people have switched bodies, go with it. Show the guy, in the hot babe’s body, playing with her boobs because he can. Show him hanging out in the girl’s locker room, looking at all the boobs. Show the girl “accidentally” grazing the boobs of the other hot chicks who are also naked. Show her (with her guy’s mind) trying to hit on a hot chick. Show the virginal, never-been-with-a-boy chick playing around with the new guy’s body, seeing how things work. Or reaching in a fascinated manner for other guys’ junk. There is potential for masturbation jokes, lesbian scenes, homosexual humour and general mayhem with actual useful nudity and the clever use of over-the-top profanity.

OK, this is the movie I’m seeing in my head. This is the movie I WANT to see. In fact, this may well be the movie I want to make. If you’re going to do a movie like this, go ALL OUT! Half-assing it is the worst thing you can do with the concept. And yet, this movie totally half-asses it. And it kills me. And it kills this movie. Samaire Armstrong is absolutely gorgeous, one of the hottest women in movies right now, and I assume that Kevin Zegers is some kind of gorgeous up-and-coming boy toy for the ladies. But that alone can’t be a reason to watch. And this movie doesn’t give you any other reason. So…don’t watch.

Lucy Liu is kind of hot. Not hot enough to carry a movie on her own, but kinda hot in a dominatrix, angrily-sexy-chick kind of way. And she can not carry Rise: Blood Hunter on her own. The cover of this movie makes it look like Blade, or Underworld, or Van Helsing, or any one of these vampire-hunter movies that have begun to crop up everywhere. But it isn’t. It’s much worse. You see, Lucy Liu is kinda-dominatrix-hot, and that’s it. She is not an excellent actress, she is just a passable actress in secondary roles. Remember Ecks vs. Sever? God knows I wish I didn’t. Rise: Blood Hunter also stars Michael Chiklis, most recently seen in The Shield and Fantastic Four, but still best-loved by all for The Commish. His character keeps showing up, but is given absolutely nothing to do in the film. His involvement in the final scene is irritating, since we just don’t care about him at all. But then, we don’t care about anyone else either.

Lucy Liu plays a reporter who is working on a story about a cult. She gets attacked by a vampire, and becomes one. She then sets out to destroy all vampires. In the process, she undergoes an instantaneous transformation from a meek, sad little weakling into a tough-talking, bad-ass little weakling. The lines here are painful. “Have mercy”. “Sorry, I’m fresh out just now.” Not only are you ripping off the line, you’re making it immeasureable worse. The movie is told in that disjointed narrative that Tarantino popularized with Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, but the director clearly has no idea why that style is effective. He just thinks people seem to like that.

And then the bizarre cameos. Marilyn Manson shows up as a bartender, which I understand. It’s goth, it’s vampires, it’s Marilyn Manson. He can’t act at all, but at least the pieces fit. Then…Nick Lachey shows up for two minutes as some thug in the hood. Nicke Lachey? What? And there is nudity. Tons of female nudity, all the way through, much of it courtesy of Lucy Liu herself. However, it is all that obnoxious kind of nudity where you never get a full-frontal boob shot (except for that hooker at the very beginning), and therefore the camera has to go to some pretty strange angles to avoid showing everything at once. Your actress agreed to appear nude. You are showing her nipples anyway. Do you get a better rating if you show them only one at a time and from a side view? Come on. Rise: Blood Hunter is kind of worth it for the nudity, but if you’re that kind of pervert, Lucy Liu is also naked in City of Industry, full boobs, and the movie is much better.