The schlock
merchants responsible for College should
be grateful that it opened on the same day as Disaster Movie. In any other week, the risible teen sex romp would
walk away with the prize for most pathetic excuse for a comedy. Yet insulting
audiences with College and Disaster
Movie on the same weekend threatens to
split the lucrative, undiscriminating dumb-ass demographic.
A film that
threatens to give gratuitous nudity, profanity, and rank stupidity a bad name, College casts Drake Bell of Nickelodeon's Drake
& Josh (you can probably guess which
one he plays) as an uptight high-school senior whose girlfriend dumps him for
being boring. Eager to prove her wrong, Bell heads to a local college for a Dionysian
weekend alongside McLovin wannabe Kevin Covais (rapidly burning off the 15
minutes in the spotlight his turn on American Idol afforded him) and hard-partying fat slob Andrew
Caldwell, who appears to be the product of an experiment to clone Chris Farley
gone horribly awry. The three wan stereotypes end up crashing at a disreputable
fraternity house under the Stalin-like rule of suspiciously ancient actors who
haven't looked college-age since early in the Clinton era.
College is powered by alternating currents of wish-fulfillment
and mindless cruelty. So the hapless high-school dorks spend 10 percent of the
film inexplicably getting laid, 80 percent of the film getting humiliated, and 10
percent enacting unlikely revenge on their geriatric tormentors. It's a joyless
misfire determined to deliver the time-tested staples of the college
comedy—pot-smoking, binge drinking, cruel pranks, anonymous hook-ups, authority-offending,
nonstop boobage—in the most perfunctory, least satisfying manner
imaginable. It's not an encouraging sign when the appearance of a
urination-happy Verne Troyer—in his worst film of the summer, no small
feat considering the competition is Uwe Boll's Postal and Mike Meyers' The Love Guru—classes up the proceedings considerably. First-time
director Deb Hagan desperately wants her hard-R College to be Superbad. Instead, it's merely god-awful.