ROAD TRIP

by Gary Susman

Let's face it -- American Pie aside, there hasn't been a solid, raunchy, gross, and (duh!) sophomoric teen sex comedy for a while. Hence Road Trip, a gleefully crass, moderately twisted entry that features the inexplicably alluring Tom Green, the MTV practical joker and sadomasochist, as an eight-year-plan college student named Barry Manilow. He's the narrator and geek chorus of this tale about a student, Josh (Breckin Meyer), who videotapes himself cheating on his girlfriend and then accidentally mails her the cassette. Josh and three pals drive halfway across the country to intercept the tape. High jinks ensue, some hilarious, some homoerotic, some merely hive-inducing and hurl-worthy.

Director/co-writer Todd Phillips, who explored college hazing rituals in his controversial documentary Frat House by undergoing them himself, puts a few novel and perverse spins on the genre (that's him playing the toe-sucking molester on a Greyhound bus). Yet apart from its comic set pieces, Road Trip is thin gruel except as a showcase for three of its performers: Amy Smart, as the coed who's too good for Josh but takes the initiative throughout the movie to win him anyway; Seann William Scott, amplifying his smirky Steve Stifler from Pie; and the unsettling Green, whose near-swallowing of a live mouse, along with his stoner-from-another-planet line readings, will surely make him an even bigger star among the Clearasil set. After all, if you're old enough to remember how little college was actually like what happens in Road Trip, this movie's not for you anyway. At Cinema World, Entertainment Cinemas, Framingham, Gardner, the Hoyt Westborough, Leominster, the Maynard Fine Arts, the Solomon Pond Hoyt, and the Worcester North Showcase.