Project X (2012)

Directed by Nima Nourizadeh. Starring Oliver Cooper, Thomas Mann, Jonathan Daniel Brown, Kirby Bliss Blanton, Peter Mackenzie, Caitlin Dulany, Miles Teller, Alexis Knapp, Rick Shapiro, Rob Evors, Martin Klebba, Dax Flame. [R]

The only thing separating this nihilistic “comedy” about a teenager-hosted house party gone insanely wrong from the bottom of the barrel is a pool of vomit, and spending time in the company of the vomit might be more appealing than another minute with these youths-gone-stoopid. The loathsome trio of main characters are lazily modeled off of the Superbad crew (though, for the sake of comparison, this movie can’t even meet the “high bar” set by most of the American Pie spinoffs), and the party Cooper throws for birthday boy Mann while the latter’s parents are out of town escalates from lame to wild to excessive to only-in-your-dreams to only-in-your-nightmares—if you’re asking if a disgruntled drug dealer shows up wielding a flamethrower at one point while cops pepper him with rubber bullets, the answer is yes. Any longshot possibility of wrenching out a real rude-and-crude laugh from this demented exercise in adolescent male fantasy is eradicated by tonal turpitude; its morality needle is spun so far out of whack that, without a subversive counterpoint, it actually invites the audience to sympathize or relate with these creeps instead of just chuckling at how dangerously irresponsible and reprehensible they are. Making the entire experience even more unpleasant is its found-footage visual scheme—recorded by a rarely-seen teenager who may or may not have murdered his parents(!)—which, as expected, not only pulverizes the eyeballs with eyesore aesthetics but also proves time and again to be logically impossible (example: the camera moves immediately from rooftop to ground-level to witness a kid leaping off the house into a bouncing castle, miraculously uninjured). Some of the soundtrack selections are dope (Queens of the Stone Age, Eminem, the XX, LCD Soundsystem, Nas, a Yeah Yeah Yeahs remix, etc.), but otherwise, discard this party invite and just, like, stay home and play Xbox or something. Produced by Todd Phillips. Miles Teller (evidently) plays himself in a handful of walk-ons; same goes for Jimmy Kimmel in a cameo at the end.

10/100