Alyson Hannigan

DATE MOVIE

STARRING: Alyson Hannigan, Adam Campbell, Tony Cox, Eddie Griffin, Sophie Monk

WRITERS/DIRECTORS: Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer

RATING: *1/2

# The skinny: The plot, if you can call it that, revolves around Julia Jones (Alyson Hannigan), a grotesquely obese waitress in dire need of love.

Sick of her terrific failures in getting a man, she turns to date doctor Hitch (Tony Cox), who gets a team to, uh, suck the ugliness out of her. She then joins a reality dating programme for her dream man, English bachelor Grant Funkyerdoder (Adam Campbell), and ends up the last woman standing as her opponents are blown away.

But first, she must deal with her parents and Grant’s ex, the sexually-supercharged Andy (Sophie Monk).

# The review: Ostensibly a parody of romantic comedies (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Meet The Parents, When Harry Met Sally and My Big Fat Greek Wedding) and seemingly every other blockbuster made in the last 20 years, Date Movie feels more like a sequence of skits from a particularly bad Saturday Night Live episode than a movie.

Except you can’t change the channel.

The film-makers seem to believe that references to more famous scenes in better movies, topped with copious amounts of butts, farts and body hair (with a dash of nipple), is parody - even humour.

They are wrong. That’s not spoofing. That’s the surgical removal of ’funny’ from a ’funny scene’.

This is not to say that butts, farts and body hair are not funny. They are. I love stupid films like Dodgeball, Naked Gun, even Hot Shots!

But you need skill to pull off slapstick.

Only Stephen Chow can make talking to a mole on a woman’s armpit funny. And while Hannigan (the American Pie trilogy) is a competent and unself conscious performer, she’s definitely no Stephen.

Newcomer Campbell is as funny as a funeral, which is probably where his career will end up after this movie.

Most problematic of all is the script itself.

I’ve never watched Scary Movie. Even though Date Movie was written by two of the six writers of that popular spoof franchise, it’s supposedly only one-third as funny. And surely Scary Movie couldn’t have been that bad.

There’ll be more groaning than guffawing - although some parts are so absurdly ridiculous and over-the-top you can’t help but chuckle.

Plus, Aussie hottie and former Bardot member Monk does show a lot of skin, and bikini-clad Carmen Electra does get fondled by King Kong.

If you like that sort of thing.

# The one scene that justifies the ticket price: Monk re-enacting the famous Paris Hilton car-wash commercial for Carl’s Jr.

# The one scene that will eject you from your seat: Where to begin? Maybe seeing Hannigan prod at a gruesome pimple to explosive effect. Or Campbell acting out that orgasm scene from When Harry Met Sally. Or a cat humping a corpse...

# Best quote: Waitress to Grant after his orgasm: ’So you are saying, you do want the pork chops?’

# Moral of the story: Keep your cats away from grandma.

FAST FACTS

# The lead character Julia Jones was written with Alyson Hannigan in mind.

But for her leading man, the film-makers auditioned hundreds of British actors to the point where they were even thinking of changing the part to an American.

# They finally decided on Adam Campbell, who had just recently moved to Los Angeles, after just one reading.

# The National Coalition For The Homeless In America has called for a boycott of Date Movie because of a scene where Julia shouts ’bum fight’ and proceeds to beat up a homeless man with Grant. Protestors claimed it was reminiscent of a real-life beating death in the US.