DVD Talk > Reviews > Wild Cherry

Wild Cherry

Image // R // $29.97 // June 28, 2011

Review by Adam Tyner | posted July 13, 2011

R E P L A Y

A D V I C E

Skip It

E - M A I L

this review to a friend

R E V I E W S

Graphical Version

So, at one point in Wild Cherry, there's a montage of some football player jerking off into one of those plastic ice cube tray thingies, day after day after day, and those jizz-cubes wind up getting dunked

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]

into a bowl of punch along with a gigantic bottle of off-brand Viagra. In another scene, a girl hiding in the football players' bathroom farts for, like, a minute and a half straight. There are two -- two! -- record scratches, and I think the first is when Rob Schneider starts to make a salad with a carrot his daughter had just shoved up her cooter. I guess what I'm getting at is that, no, Wild Cherry really isn't very good.

Filmed all the way back in 2008 but unreleased until Bridesmaids proved there's a market for raunch-'n-estrogen, Wild Cherry tries to mold the teen sex comedy formula to be more girl-power-friendly. Helen (Tania Raymonde), Katlyn (Rumer Willis), and Trish (Kristin Cavallari) are three seniors at Benjamin Dover High (get it?!?!?!?!) who clue in that there's a cherry-popping conspiracy afoot. It's a longstanding tradition that all the dudes on the football team have to deflower a virgin. Once the team has checked off all the names in the Buccaneers' Bang Book, they're a lock to head to the playoffs. Helen and her two amigettes clue in that the book isn't just an urban legend after all, and they decide to fire back with all sorts of pranks and wacky shenanigans.

Well, one of the weirder things about Wild Cherry is that it never really figures out what it's trying to say. The girls wobble back and forth from "incensed!" to "oh, I wanna fuck these guys anyway, so I'm cool with it" to "no, wait, I think I am incensed after all" back to "just put it in me", which might be okay if anything at all happened in the story to compel them to change their minds, only it...just...kinda happens. It's also kind of bizarre that Helen, Katlyn, and Trish are all dating and seemingly completely happy with these dudes as they dupe them into posing for nekkid, homoerotic photos that the girls then plaster all over the school. The hell? The guys in this movie are slightly assholish,

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]

sure, but they're not really portrayed as villains or anything. They never force themselves on any of the girls they've been assigned. Outside of the locker room scene where the Bang Book is set up, they really don't ever say anything cruel or demeaning. They're actually surprisingly sensitive and completely open when they're talking to the girls. In fact, even when Helen, Katlyn, and Trish try to rally the troops -- to convince all the girls in the senior class to resist putting out until the end of the football season -- everyone they're talking to walks out of the room, completely disinterested. The guys are transparent about what they want, and at least in this movie, the girls are completely into it, so...I guess I don't see what the problem is?

...and maybe you're reading this and are wondering why I'm putting so much thought into character motivations in a direct-to-video teen sex comedy. Well, thinking about that sort of thing is one way to pass an hour and a half 'cause I definitely wasn't laughing. Nope. Not a single laugh scattered around anywhere in here. You do get awesome stuff like Rob Schneider shaving when his daughter bursts into the bathroom. "Dad! It's ten to seven! What are you doing?" "I'll give you three guesses. It rhymes with 'maving'." Because "shaving" rhymes with "maving"! Get it?!? Tia Carrere shows up just long enough for a Pagan-tinged musical number about "the power of the pussy", which...yeah. If there's anything funny about Wild Cherry, it's that the climax is set at the last big football game of the season, and there are all of, like, thirty-two people in the stands. No laughs. Mediocre-to-fucking-horrible acting. Glacially paced. Limited eye candy for any guys tuning in. Most of the actresses here aren't...conventionally attractive in the usual Hollywood sense, although for a movie about female empowerment, they sure do a lot of cheesecake shots. I guess dialing down the glamour is meant to make the gals seem more believable and relatable. There aren't that many good-lookin', muscular dudes strutting around with their shirts off either like I'd expect in a double-X-chromosome-targeted sex comedy. No nudity at all, just in case anyone's keeping track at home. The one kind of original thing that Wild Cherry does is sprinkle in talking head interviews with real (?) teenagers gabbing about losing their virginity: their favorite positions, where it happened, embarrassing stories...stuff like that. That winds up being about as funny and interesting as everything else in Wild Cherry, though, so...yeah, Skip It.

Video

Wild Cherry is shot and lit like a sitcom, so dazzlingly cinematic high definition eye candy it's not so much. Definition is alright. Fine detail is passable but fairly lackluster...a lot like watching a comedy on network TV, I guess. It's bright and candy-colored, so I guess there's that. Wild Cherry has a pretty low bitrate, and even with a lossless soundtrack in tow, the AVC encode adds up to all of 14 gigs. I couldn't spot any hiccups in the compression, though, so unless you're staring at a bitrate meter or something, you probably won't care. Oh, and there's no matting or anything...straightahead 1.78:1.

Audio

Wild Cherry sports a pretty uneventful 16-bit, 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio soundtrack. Like a lot of comedies, the surrounds are used somewhat sparsely...a few swirling voices, a marching

[click on the thumbnail to enlarge]

band stomping their way through a parade, locker doors clanging shut in the hallway...that sort of deal. Light atmosphere, mostly. Bass response is pretty monstrous, particularly when reinforcing the music. This is a flick where a vibrator is powered by the bass thumping out of an iPod, after all. Dialogue has kind of a harsh, brittle quality to it, dragged down by some annoying high frequency noise in the background. Some of the color commentary or whatever during the big football game is pretty much completely indiscernable, and I guess that's the worst of it. Listenable, overall, but pretty blah.

No dubs, downmixes, or commentary tracks this time around. The only other audio options are subtitles in English (SDH) and Spanish.

Extras

Just a two minute standard definition trailer.

The Final Word

Nope. Skip It.