Recently, I pulled American Virgin and Hooking Up out of the DVDTalk screener pool, expecting them both to be subpar gross-out comedies with overacting and awful jokes. I was wrong: American Virgin was a slightly-better-than-mediocre comedy with some okay performances, and Hooking Up is so inept it transcends "good" and "bad". Most movies get divided off into positive and negative because there are elements to critique, but Hooking Up barely knows how to frame a shot or stage a joke, much less embed several of them in a legitimate story. Imagine something with the basic cinematography, sound quality and framing of a YouTube short that just exists for an hour and a half, and you have this movie.
For instance, Hooking Up doesn't introduce its characters so much as describe them. After an opening scene that actually looks like something that belongs in a movie, we get a series of freeze-frame "character bio" introductions where names, ages and three "likes" are typed onto the screen. It's the cinematic equivalent of reading a casting call for the movie. As for a plot, there isn't anything specific: three main characters named John (Parker Croft), Colin (Jim deProphetis) and Tyler (Ted Sangalis) try to hook up with various girls, primarily including Colin's sister April (Allyson Muņoz), Michelle (Leah Viens-Gordon) and Caroline (Alison Whitney). Oh, yeah, there are also three other actors in the picture, i.e., the names plastered on the cover: Brian O'Halloran is school principal Dr. Jordan and Michelle's father, Corey Feldman is Caroline's cokehead boyfriend Ryan, and Bronson Pinchot is chemistry teacher Mr. Kimbal.
The film takes place over the course of a week, each day generally beginning with John looking up a crazy sex act on the internet and then the three guys getting into some sort of situation involving the same information. Most of these scenes come and go without any noticeable impact on the viewing experience. It's fascinating: the film exists in that perfect void between amateur filmmaking and home movies, exhibiting that the director and actors almost know what they're doing, while proving at the same time that they don't know quite enough. The only memorable ones are just strange and quickly unresolved, both involving Colin. Colin's character is listed (in the ID-like intro) as potentially being gay, or at least bisexual, but the movie adamantly refuses to resolve the story thread. In one of the movie's most flabbergasting scenes, Tyler discovers a hole in the Colin's bathroom wall that looks into April's room, and, having heard about glory holes, decides to try it out, but April is not home. Instead, Colin goes into her room and does the deed. You'd think this would be a huge factor in determining Colin's sexual orientation (as is Colin's decision to pleasure himself while looking into Nicolas Cage's eyes on the Snake Eyes poster), but the next day Colin is back in pursuit of the girls along with his two buddies. There is even a scene where April denies knowing what a glory hole is or anything about the incident to Tyler, and yet, Tyler does not learn that it was someone else; the movie cuts to another scene and when it cuts back, the subject has been changed. The other scene is apparently the movie's gross-out zenith, and the whole point should really be Colin and/or April's reaction to it, but we only see Tyler dealing with the repercussions.
Looking at the movie, it's hard to determine what the three recognizable names are doing here. At least Bronson Pinchot has a few scenes that make basic sense (fending off Michelle's insistent advances), but both Feldman and O'Halloran are given characters they're either too young or too old for (O'Halloran a 45-year-old principal -- he was probably 38 when the movie was shot, if not younger -- and Feldman as a 25-year-old). Even though he's more than a decade too old for the role, Feldman's character seems like a believable person, a womanizing college guy who tries to score with every high school girl he meets. What isn't realistic is the escalating amount of abuse Caroline puts up with from him as his girlfriend. At first, it's innocent stuff like ignoring her calls and demanding her over when she should be studying, but by the end of the movie, when she catches him in the middle of having sex with one of her closest friends and forces the two girls to make out, there's no more believing her insistent "but I love you" pleas or caring about her heart breaking. O'Halloran, in the meantime, simply has nothing to do: he tricks Pinchot into coming to a vegan barbecue while secretly sneaking fatty snacks on the side, but otherwise he's just kind of there, and the movie embarrassingly forces him to trot out an homage to his most famous role when Michelle scores 37 points in Scrabble.
Visually, the film looks like it was shot on retail video cameras, and not particularly great ones at that, not to mention there is no real lighting to speak of and the sound quality is often bad. To look at the film is an immediate indication of the level of professional quality it embodies. It also begs further questions of the movie's three C-listers: how much money could the film have possibly have paid if the budget is this miniscule? Director Vincent Scordia adds insult to injury by attempting to break ground in the art of off-screen comedy. There are several jokes in the movie's short running time that are either staged with the camera looking at an empty space previously occupied by the characters (like an empty hallway) or are just poorly framed within the shot.
There is one great, big laugh in Hooking Up, and it comes at the very end: the Caroline plotline ends with her running away from Ryan's house while a terribly sad song plays, and the movie abruptly cuts to credits. It's what someone I know would call an "art film ending", and it's turned unintentionally hilarious by virtue of the fact that the audience not only has no interest in whether Caroline and Ryan work out their problems, but will likely feel the exact opposite of sadness that she's left him behind. Of course, it's also funny because the movie hasn't summed a single thing up or arrived at a single conclusion, because the film has no plot to speak of. The movie's working title was Clusterf---, and it's not surprising it didn't get past the MPAA. It's too bad, it's a much more fitting title.
The DVD, Video and Audio
Hooking Up arrived on a DVD-R in a paper sleeve, so I can't confidently grade the packaging, video and audio for this release. The final product should include a 2.35:1 anamorphic widescreen presentation, Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and Spanish subtitles, although based on the film production quality present here, I imagine it won't look much better than this screener disc, which looks extremely poor.
The Extras
Final copy, according to the listing at DVDEmpire, will include a behind-the-scenes documentary, interviews, deleted and extended scenes, outtakes, bloopers and pranks and an "Anatomy of a Scene" featurette, but none of these things are present on the version I have: all this disc contains is the movie's trailer.
Conclusion
Hooking Up is a bizarre mess that isn't quite bad, but certainly isn't funny. It also looks poor, features some mildly famous people slumming it far below the level even they deserve to be working at, and scores its only big laugh at the very end by accident. Skip it.
Please check out my other DVDTalk DVD and theatrical reviews here and my film blog The Following Preview here.
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