It’s no great feat to score laughs in a Judd Apatow production with a clever script, talented castmates, and the freedom to improvise fruitfully. But it takes real talent to get them in a brutal black hole of a comedy like Miss March,co-directed, co-scripted and starring Zach Cregger and Trevor Moore of the sketch comedy troupe The Whitest Kids U Know. If there were an Academy Award for best supporting performance in a dreadful sex comedy, Craig Robinson would win for his inspired turn as a deluded rapper named Horsedick.MPEG (always remember the MPEG part) here. As a gleeful vulgarian who thinks superstardom is imminent because his songs are on the Internet, Robinson is hilarious, at least in the early going. Sadly, Robinson is all that stands between Miss March and complete worthlessness.
In a plot that cribs lazily from The House Bunny, Kickin’ It Old Skool,and the 1982 J. Geils Band hit “Centerfold,” Miss March casts Cregger as a wholesome high school student intent on saving himself for the right girl. On the verge of losing his virginity, Cregger tumbles down a flight of stairs and ends up in a coma for years. After waking from his coma, Cregger learns that his chaste girlfriend has become a Playboy playmate. With the help of best buddy Moore, who fancies himself a suave acolyte of the Playboy philosophy and a high priest in the Church Of Hef, Cregger embarks on a road trip/sacred pilgrimage to the Playboy Mansion to win back his lost love.
As the film’s white-bread Rip Van Winkle, Cregger is as terminally bland as Moore is obnoxious. Despite his complete dearth of admirable qualities, the film gives sentient smirk Moore a gorgeous girlfriend whose epilepsy is played for the kind of dumb gross-out sex gags that should have gone out of style with the first wave of There’s Something About Mary knockoffs. March gets the mean-to-funny ratio wrong; it’s misanthropic, smutty, and smug, but with a few notable Robinson-engineered exceptions, never even remotely chuckle-inducing.