Meanwhile, Pampinea’s off-again/on-again boyfriend, Lorenzo (Christensen) has been chased out of the city by Tim Roth. Thus, denied his shot at getting hot, corseted makeouts from a grieving daughter, he pretends to be deaf and mute so that he can get a job as a gardener at a convent full of horny nuns.
This, I think, is where Leland’s script goes off the rails. Not because of the scenes that take place in the sexy convent, but because this movie insists on having scenes that aren’t set in the sexy convent. That’s a goldmine that could’ve gotten this thing a permanent slot on Cinemax at 3 AM.
Instead, pre-Shakespearean hijinx ensue: Pampinea ends up going to the convent to escape her various marriages and disapproves of Lorenzo’s apparent mission to cause as many allegedly immaculate conceptions as he can, her two fiancees fight in the woods, and her friends end up being seduced by the local peasantry in a scene that made me feel really, really old…
…because all I could think while watching it was that getting it on underneath a cow would have to smell just awful. Then again, this movie’s set before the advent of indoor plumbing, so it’s probably not that bad, relatively speaking.
Admittedly, there are a couple of funny scenes, and the girls are certainly nice to look at, but this is a movie that just can’t figure out if it wants to be a lowbrow sex farce or a fluffy period piece. Instead, it tries to do both, which means that nothing gets to be as big as it ought to — Tim Roth should’ve been chewing scenery at an Alan-Rickman-In-Robin-Hood-Prince-of-Thieves level — and the whole thing’s just boring.
It’s a real shame, too, because with the failure of Hugh Hefner’s full-on porno version back in the ’60s (a project he abandoned before becoming the world’s horniest mummy), The Decameron has never gotten the sexy modern adaptation it really deserves. Fortunately, I’m already hard at work on my next script, Harold & Kumar Escape the Black Death.
Call me, Hollywood.
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 Chris Sims is a freelance comedy writer from South Carolina. He briefly attended USC before he dropped out to spend more time with Grand Theft Auto, and his career subsequently took the path that you might expect from someone who makes that sort of decision. He blogs at http://www.the-isb.com and creates comics at http://www.actionagecomics.com. |