ROAD TRIP - DVD review

Raunch sells. See "American Pie."

Produced by the co-maker of "Animal House," Ivan Reitman, and taking its cue from the road trip in that earlier movie, the infinitely inferior "Road Trip" piles ever more crude jokes and gross-out humor upon insulting stereotypes. With plenty of sex and nudity thrown in to keep its adolescent male viewers occupied, the result is a yawner of a screen comedy. Then, with typical Hollywood hypocrisy the DVD is marketed as "unrated" and "uncensored," ensuring that its young target audience will want all the more what it isn't supposed to have.

Stop me if the plot of "Road Trip" sounds familiar; you may have channel surfed into 1997's "Overnight Delivery" at one time or another on your local cable network. The two movies are virtually identical except the older film is less vulgar and a tad funnier. "Road Trip" involves a college student, Josh (Breckin Meyer), who goes to school in Ithaca, New York, while his longtime girlfriend, Tiffany (Rachel Blanchard), attends school in Austin, Texas. One night Josh foolishly videotapes an affair he has with another girl, Beth (Amy Smart), and the next day accidentally mails the tape to Tiffany. The story is about Josh and his roommates' 1800-mile trip across country to retrieve the incriminating cassette before Tiffany sees it.

The film is nothing more than a series of gags strung out along the trip. You can imagine the writers, Todd Phillips (who also directed) and Scott Armstrong, sitting down and dreaming up the jokes before they ever had a story line to hang them on. I'm sure a film like "There's Something About Mary" must have encouraged them to be as outrageous as possible, but ideas like making a deposit at a sperm bank to raise money, stealing a bus from a school for the blind, and crashing an all-black fraternity are neither funny nor particularly original; nor is the infamous French toast scene unprecedented, being merely a tasteless variation of Radar O'Reilly's "armpit sandwich" from the old "M.A.S.H" TV show.

None of this would matter, of course, if "Road Trip" didn't commit the one cardinal sin of comedy: it's not very funny. I counted one character I thought was even slightly amusing--the goofy narrator, Barry (Tom Green)--and three scenes at which I broke into more than a smile. For the first half hour I sat almost stupefied with boredom; then, at thirty-four minutes and twenty-nine seconds into the film, Josh's roommate thinks he can jump a collapsed bridge with their car, and I laughed. At one hour, seven minutes, and fifty-two seconds into the plot, Mitch the boa constrictor attempts to eat Barry's arm, and I laughed. Finally, at one hour and ten minutes, a crude joke concerning a horny grandfather on Viagra tickled me. That was it.

To inject as much nudity into the picture as possible, the story is told by the wacko campus tour guide, Barry, who spices up his narrative with his own fantasies. "Wait," object several female members of Barry's tour. "She was standing around topless? Girls don't just stand around naked." "Oh, yeah, they do," says Barry. "This is my story, OK?" To prove the point, the camera not only focuses on topless (and bottomless) girls in what the disc menu playfully refers to as the "obligatory shower scene," it moves to an extreme close-up of several girls' tops. You can see some sort of parody of films like "Porky's" here, but at least the shower-room scene in "Porky's" was funny.

Possibly the single most distinguishing difference, though, between "Road Trip" and classic screen gross-out comedies is the cast. The characters in "Road Trip" are basically interchangeable. It was as if the filmmakers wanted to make a shocking, cutting-edge comedy but were afraid to exaggerate enough to make it funny. The characters are too realistic, in fact, and too much alike to be funny. Where's John Belushi's Bluto Blutarsky when you need him? Paul Costanzo as the intellectual Rubin is just another good-looking party guy. Seann William Scott as the swinging E.L. is just another good-looking Jim Carrey wannabe. D.J. Qualls as the socially inept Kyle is just another reject from "Revenge of the Nerds." Fred Ward as Kyle's tough-guy father, Earl, is just another of Ward's stock heavies. Only Barry, the psycho narrator, has any unique personality, if you call swallowing mice unique.

Video:
Fortunately for fans of home theater, all is not lost. The movie does have some good audiovisual qualities. The image is brightly and naturally colored in a 1.74:1 ratio widescreen format. There is very little grain in the picture, some small degree of fuzziness around the edges, and a few ragged, shimmering lines. In one scene the tiers on a set of outdoor bleachers dance merrily about, but it is not common to most of the film.

Audio:
The soundtrack, which comes in three flavors--Dolby Digital 5.1, DTS 5.1, and Dolby 2.0 Surround--is quite good in DD 5.1 for what it's called upon to do. Mostly, it reproduces its rock-music background at sufficiently loud volumes and with sufficiently wide frequency and dynamic ranges to satisfy its intended listeners. There's not an abundance of rear-channel effects, but left-to-right front-channel separation is excellent.

Extras:
As for bonus items on this "Unrated" edition from DreamWorks, we get about ten minutes of deleted scenes, eight or ten segments that are even less funny than what remained in the picture and were best left out. There's a five-minute featurette called "Ever Been on a Road Trip?" that provides a few comments from the actors. An Eels music video, "Mr. E's Beautiful Blues," is kind of laid back and might offer more comfort than the movie itself. Then, there are extensive cast and crew biographies and filmographies, production notes both on the disc and in the booklet insert, some DVD-ROM features I didn't access like a trivia game and a screensaver, twenty-four scene selections, and a widescreen trailer. Finally, DreamWorks maintain their tradition of affording only English as a spoken language and only English for captioning. As for the "unrated" part, I couldn't tell you. The original theatrical release came in at ninety-one minutes and this DVD edition is listed at ninety-five. So, I can only assume that four minutes of stuff was added. My guess is that at least the shower-room scene was extended.

Parting Shots:
In choosing a director for a big-time screen comedy, you'd think the producers would find someone with at least a little experience in comedy. Instead, they went with Todd Phillips, who had never made a major Hollywood movie before and whose only previous claim to fame was the documentary, "Frat House." After doing "Road Trip," Mr. Phillips can safely assert that he still has no experience in comedy.