Worst of Netflix: Virgin Territory

Every week, I scour Netflix for a movie rated at one star and put it in my queue, suffering through it for your entertainment so that you don’t have to. In the past, I’ve taken on anime cancer demons, softcore Iraq War porn and racist ventriloquism, and this week it’s one of the classics of Western literature.  But with titties.

Virgin Territory (2007)

Starring: Hayden Christensen in one of his least embarrassing roles.

Ask anybody who knows me and they’ll tell you:  I am a fan of the high concept.  I mean, on my desk right now, I have a copy of Godzilla vs. Barkley, an officially licensed comic book from 1993 where Godzilla rises from the ocean to do battle on the basketball court with a 300 foot-tall Sir Charles.  But even I have my limits, and when your movie’s description begins with a sentence like “Raunchy teen comedy meets the Black Plague,” I’m pretty sure things aren’t going to work out all that well.

Such is the case with Virgin Territory, which attempts to be American Pie meets a Renaissance Faire and ends up being… Well, American Pie meets a Renaissance Faire.

Remember when you were in school and you’d watch a video where some dude would try to make learning fun by offering up some “cool raps… about math!“?  That’s pretty much what we’re dealing with here, except that instead of busting rhymes about coefficients, writer/director David Leland is adapting the sexy parts of The Decameron, a series of satirical novellas by 14th century Italian author Giovanni Boccaccio.

You know.  Because that’s what the kids are into.

Like all sexy teen comedies, Virgin Territory opens with a beautiful young woman’s parents dying of the bubonic plague.  This is Pampinea (Mischa Barton), who is now faced with the classic nobility-in-1352 trouble of being betrothed to a Russian count and having an evil noble (Tim Roth) trying to force her into marriage.  Thus, she and her friends ditch Florence and the ravages of the plague for hot times at her family’s villa in the countryside, a journey which finds them promptly waylaid by slave traders who force them to work the stripper pole.

That might seem like something of an anachronism, but according to my research, poledancing actually was invented in Florence in 1349 by Lexxus de Medici.

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.