Dirty Love (2005)

Directed by John Mallory Asher. Starring Jenny McCarthy, Kam Heskin, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Carmen Electra, Victor Webster, Guillermo Díaz, Renee Albert, Lochlyn Munro, Jessica Collins. [R]

My mouth hung agape for at least sixty of these ninety minutes of waffling, loathsomely unfunny “comedy”, inept on every level of production, starting (but certainly not ending) with the screenplay, penned by star, Jenny McCarthy. The life of her character—just say she’s playing herself, ‘cause it’s not like she has range as an actress—has fallen apart after she caught her scumbag model boyfriend (Webster) sleeping with another woman, so she tries to find a stud to be seen with in his vicinity to inspire jealousy or get revenge or win him back or…it’s unclear, so who knows and who cares? When McCarthy throws herself into mugging for laughs that are never going to come, she’s appalling, but she’s no worse than her co-stars: Kam Heskin as a vapid, breathy “blonde ho” stereotype and Carmen Electra going over-the-top as an Ebonics-spouting ghetto “hood rat” that falls just short of blackface. If the former Playboy Playmate had a shred of dignity, it waved bye-bye the moment she’s seen sitting on the floor of a drugstore in a pool of menstrual blood big enough to be seen from an airplane; it’s one of several “look how nasty this is, isn’t it hi-lar-ious??” toilet-humor moments strung together on a clothesline between instances of grotesque gender and ethnic stereotyping which believe pointing out a behavioral cliché is good enough to qualify as a joke (see also: pop culture references from Jason Friedberg/Aaron Seltzer movies). A thoroughly odious experience, but I’ll give it two points—one for my unexpected snort of amusement at the end of a three-person slap-fest, one for McCarthy not, ahem, injecting any anti-vaxxer propaganda into the cesspool. Pop-punk band Sum 41 appears as themselves, with frontman Deryck Whibley even getting a few lines of dialogue (his performance is less humiliating than Electra’s, at the very least).

2/100