The trailers for THE VIRGINITY HIT promised a coming of age tale about a teenager trying various techniques to lose his virginity. That sounded promising, as watching any awkward teenager try to behave normally when sex is on the line is always funny. But the film debuted to less than rave reviews and at the end of the day, audiences felt duped by the clever marketing campaign. This is not a film about a teenager losing his virginity, this is a film about a teenager trying to deal with the love of his life cheating on him. There’s a big difference because one film is funny and one is not. Unfortunately, this one is not.
We start out following the relationship between Matt and Nicole; a cute, seemingly perfect young couple. Matt’s friend, Zack, is videotaping the days leading up to Matt and Nicole finally consummating their relationship. So here’s where the film went wrong; about 20 minutes into it, Matt discovers that Nicole cheated on him at a frat party, which changes the whole tone of the film. This starts a chain reaction of ridiculous decisions that are neither funny nor original. Thrust into a deep depression because the love of his life cheated on him, Matt’s friends encourage him to get out of the house and pursue several ridiculous opportunities to have sex. He gets set up by a conniving grad student, has an incredibly awkward near-miss with his pseudo-sister and then encounters his favorite porn star, but the cloud of depression hangs over every sequence. What could have been funny just turned out to be sad.
We either shouldn’t have had Nicole in the movie in the first place, or should have had them trying to film their encounter be the catalyst for the break-up. Having her cheat on him made everything awkward. This was a really cute couple that was looking forward to a special night, only to find the girl got drunk and slept with some random guy a couple of weeks before. Then the guy goes out with a girl he met on the internet and he gets humiliated. Then he almost sleeps with his foster sister in a very unfunny and uncomfortable chain of events. Those are three things that induce sympathy from an audience and with that much pity being thrown around, it was hard to find anything funny. Then the encounter with the porn star was awkward and confusing to the point it felt like they had already finished the script and then realized they hadn’t written a full 90 minutes yet.
I think THE VIRGINITY HIT had the right idea as far as creating genuine characters go through “hilarious” situations, but they did it in a way that there were too many conflicting emotions from the audience. No one wants to see one guy get beat down to the point of depression and then watch as his friends laugh at him. The script could have used some professional tweaking to find the right balance of comedy and drama, which would have led to a more humorous film than what we ended up with.