I've heard WILD CHERRY (2009) described as "AMERICAN PIE for girls." I would recommend to those girls that they skip this dud and just watch AMERICAN PIE instead. That is, if they're looking for a raunchy teen comedy that's actually funny.
It turns out that the football players at Benjamin Dover High School (I'll let you think about that name for a second) have what they call the "Buccaneer Bang Book", a list of female virgins who must be devirginized before the big game lest bad luck befall the team. Naturally, most of these guys are your stereotypical sexist pigs so we can't wait to see them get their comeuppance and blah, blah, blah.
Meanwhile, classmates Helen, Chase, and Trish are obsessed with having sex too, especially Helen who's a virgin but is planning a romantic coupling with her football player boyfriend Stanford any day now. But when they find out about the book, it makes them mad and they vow not to "give it up" to any of the guys, while "getting back at them" in humiliating ways. It's gold, Jerry, gold!
While such a premise may have yielded some laughs in the right hands, those hands aren't anywhere near this lame effort. The script was written by a bunch of guys so I have no idea where their heads were at when they concocted this "girl power" story that female viewers are meant to identify with.
Director Dana Lustig's attempts to wring the intended laughs out of it fall short due to an inability to put together even the most cliched sequences (such as the climactic football game) without making them look like a clumsy high school AV project. Helen's "desperately trying to have her first self-induced orgasm" scene is just sad. We anticipate something funny when she goes after Stanny at a go-cart track, but after running him off the road once, that's it. It doesn't help that everything's drowned out by an endless succession of loud, crappy soundtrack songs ranging from metal to emo.
Later, during a party, we're treated to the dubious hilarity of the girls spiking the boys' punch with an overdose of "boner pills" that not only leave them all stricken with painful erections but send at least one of them to the hospital. Hey, there's a great message for teens! Another substance ends up in the punch, too, in an attempt to outdo the "Stifler's beer" scene from AMERICAN PIE. If you can get through it without gagging, you win a cookie.
Rob Schneider, who's used to being in bad comedies, manages to work up a chuckle or two in his role as a sad dad who doesn't want daughter Helen to move to Paris to live with her mom or to have sex. It's funny when he tries to introduce her to various birth control methods which he clearly knows nothing about ("This is a female condom. It goes...uh, in") and his obvious fear of being left alone actually gives the movie a teensy bit of heart.
Tia Carrere's turn as a wacko teacher who tries to hip the girls to "the power of pussy" is unlikely to boost her career. As Helen, Tania Raymonde is okay but she isn't funny. Neither are Kristin Cavallari (Trish), Rumer Willis (as oddball Chase), or Ryan "Comanche Moon" Merriman as Stanford. Jesse Moss (DEAR MR. GACY, MERLIN AND THE BOOK OF BEASTS) does display a modicum of comedic skills as Skeets, keeper of the Bang Book, but it's a lost cause.
The DVD from Image Entertainment is in 1.78:1 widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 surround. Subtitles are in English and Spanish. A trailer is the sole extra.
In one of the film's father-daughter scenes, Rob Schneider learns a disturbing fact about Helen and pleads, "Please go back in time to before you told me that story." You might find yourself saying the same thing to the makers of WILD CHERRY after it's over. But if you're determined to give it a try, at least keep a few boner pills handy.
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