Teens go on a forgettable romp in 'Eurotrip'

Friday, February 20, 2004

By SEAN AXMAKER
SPECIAL TO THE POST-INTELLIGENCER

I'm not sure if it's comforting or disheartening to know that the die-hard teen sex comedy hasn't changed from when I was a teenager in the 1970s. The credits sequence, an animated parody of airline safety instructions, diagrams everything the film is about: sex, alcoholic excess, sex, bodily function gags, sex, topless young women and, of course, sex.

MOVIE REVIEW

EUROTRIP

DIRECTOR: Jeff Schaffer

CAST: Scott Mechlowicz, Jacob Pitts, Michelle Trachtenberg, Travis Wester

RUNNING TIME: 92 minutes

RATING: R for sexuality, nudity, language and drug/alcohol content

WHERE: Bella Bottega 11, Cinema 17, Crossroads 8, East Valley 13, Everett 9, Factoria, Grand Cinemas, Issaquah 9, Longston Place 14, Marysville Cinema 14, Mountlake 9, Oak Tree, Pacific Place, Parkway Plaza 12, Woodinville 12

GRADE: C

The premise is simple: Amiable but timid high school grad Scott (Scott Mechlowicz) is publicly dumped by his cheating girlfriend the same day he freaks out at the amorous suggestions of his German pen pal "Mike." The latter is a simple matter of grammatical gender confusion; he belatedly discovers she's actually a nubile babe named Mieke (Jessica Boehrs) and he's instantly in love. Or at least in lust, if his dreams are any indication.

So he flies off to Europe with his reckless and unpredictable best friend Cooper (Jacob Pitts), teams up with buddies Jenny (Michelle Trachtenberg) and Jamie (Travis Wester) and takes a whirlwind tour of the continent as he tracks down his fetching fraulein. Along the way, they get shanghaied by a drunken bunch of British football hooligans, groped by a creepy Italian on a train and chased by a hairy horde of male nudists.

Too slim to call a story, this string of bawdy gags provides a few junk food laughs (enjoyable but insubstantial), a couple of juvenile sex fantasies and plenty of breasts along the counterfeit backdrop of a European vacation. The kids are amiable enough traveling companions, but the usual barrage of gross-out gags so common to teen comedy is replaced here by a weird streak of per-

versity, from the lecherous but naive Cooper becoming the target of an elaborate sodomy gag to a crudely tasteless Hitler gag to the climactic violation of the sanctity of the Vatican -- both figuratively and literally.

Yet for all the debauchery, there's a juvenile candor in its knowing embrace of teen sex comedy cliches, as if the entire film is just one of Scott's fantasies. You half expect him to jolt awake at the end, and why not? The film fades just like a half-remembered dream.