“We’re just having a little get-together…”
The H-Bomb: Dorky high school kid Thomas is turning seventeen on the same weekend that his parents are going out of town for their anniversary. So his best friend, Costa (a poor man’s Jonah Hill), sees the opportunity to throw a huge birthday party at Thomas’s house. He plans on making it epic, the birthday party to end all birthday parties, even recruiting goth weirdo Dax, from the “Gay/V Club,” to videotape the whole thing. Being that Costa is a deep and sensitive young man, his noble goal for this celebration is to get Thomas and himself laid by the hottest girls in school. [Swift note: shocking]
They’ll party all Friday night, spend the rest of the weekend cleaning up, and Thomas’s folks will be none the wiser. Unfortunately for them, they did too good a job getting the word out, as practically every young person in Pasadena shows up (along with a creepy middle-aged guy), drinking and drugging and dry humping the night away. Shit gets crazier and crazier as people jump off roofs, cars are driven into pools, and eventually the cops are called to the scene, followed by the news media, then the SWAT Team. Finally, the roof is literally set on fire, and all Thomas and Costa can do is stand-by helplessly and watch the motherfucker burn, burn motherfucker, burn.
If you’re looking for any more story than that, then go see something else. Take any teenage sex comedy you’ve ever seen, American Pie, Superbad, whatever, take the party scene from those movies, stretch it out to feature length, shoot it in “Found Footage/Faux-Doc” style, amp up the alcohol/drug use by about a million, then throw in a cute little dog, a guy with a flame thrower, a couple of overzealous twelve-year-old security guards, and a testicle punching midget (billed as “Angry Little Person”), and you have the sure to be modern masterpiece, the film that will most definitely sweep next years Oscars, and be studied by film students and scholars for generations to come… Project X.
Okay, so Project X isn’t any kind of masterpiece, nor will it be studied by anyone (except as a “How to party” guide by socially challenged high schoolers). When I first read the synopsis to this movie, I thought it sounded fucking terrible. When I watched the trailer, I thought it looked fucking terrible. I didn’t even like going to these kinds of parties when I was in high school, why in the hell would I want to watch a whole movie about one, especially one shot in that uber-cliched “Found Footage” style. I really did drag my heels into the screening, fearing that this would be so Goddamn stupid that I would actually feel my brain cells die off as I watched it.
So, much to my own surprise, I have to say that Project X isn’t half bad. Again, it’s no classic, but over the course of its eighty-something minutes, it actually won me over… to an extent. Yeah, the main characters are a couple of shallow idiots, and the story only barely qualifies as a story, but it did make me kind of like these characters (the not-Jonah Hill guy does grow on you, despite being an obnoxious douche), it did make me feel like I was in the middle of this shindig, and it did make me laugh with more than a few outrageous, what-the-fuck moments that kept me on my toes. Of course, I won’t spoil them here, except to say the things they do to that poor little dog… oh, and the encounter with a psychotic drug dealer and his bird flippin’ garden gnome… hilarious!
Apparently, this is based on a true incident that happened in Australia, but I couldn’t tell you how much is actually based on fact, as it all does get pretty absurd towards the end. I imagine, in real life, this party would have been broken up long before an entire army of cops had to roll in with full riot gear and tear gas. Sorry, but by that point, where the film becomes somewhat serious and practically turns into Goddamn Die Hard, I really stopped believing in what I was seeing. Also, if I were to nitpick, I would wonder why Thomas is so head over heels for the “school hottie,” whom he barely knows, when his best female friend, who is clearly interested in him, is equally as attractive. Just sayin’.
I could go on with such nitpicks, but what’s the point. This isn’t a movie for critics, this is a movie for the people who made things like Superbad and The Hangover the hits that they were. Project X doesn’t quite have the charm, or the likeable characters, or even the quotable dialogue that those movies gave us, but it does supply the raunchiness in spades, and fans of that kind of un-PC, dick n’ fart toilet humor should definitely check it out.
