THE title “Sex Drive” is a pun about a road trip in search of nooky, but it’s also an apt image of what it’s like to be a teen guy. You’re the car. The stick shift is driving you.
Cringing under the weight of his virginity, Ian (Josh Zuckerman) is, as his older brother points out, “18 and you’ve never had sex. That’s how people get gay.” Seems reasonable to Ian. Also, at work Ian is required to dress as a doughnut with a mustache, but a little hottie from out of state has been flirting him up on the Internet.
Time to steal big brother’s 1969 GTO (license plate: NOFATCHX) and head from Chicagoland to Knoxville, Tenn., with his two best buds, a guy and a girl.
“Sex Drive” is a filthy little low-budget sex comedy that contains perhaps more jokes about urine – fat ropy streams of it, splooshing in from every angle – than you may require, and on the surface it reminds you of a lot of other movies. But this one is actually funny.
It’s got an Amish rave, a talking Jean-Claude Van Damme poster and a pudgy teen running maniacally through the cornfields while (a) nude and (b) handcuffed to a brass bed. What else can I say except that it must be seen, possibly more than once? It also has a pretty decent catchphrase: “Rumspringa!”
Ian, when he isn’t getting headlocked by his older brother (James Marsden is in top form here), gawps at the sexploits of his buddy Lance. Lance has glasses, a moon-shaped face and a belly. Obviously he is a total chick magnet – thanks to the performance of Clark Duke, who gives Lance so much completely unearned self-esteem that he actually does seem like the kind of guy who could date about six levels above his gene pool. Check him out in the jail scene: The guy commands respect faster than Tony Montana.
Also along for the drive is Ian’s best female friend, Felicia (Amanda Crew, another find), who seems to spend a disturbing amount of time having disturbingly passionate arguments with Lance as Ian watches helplessly.
“Sex Drive” has shaky moments, and its smutty gags aren’t edited so much as slammed together. But the bedroom and bathroom stuff isn’t really the point; there are interesting characters (you never quite know what the sarcastic Amish guy played by Seth Green is going to do next) and a disarming innocence. John Hughes’ “Sixteen Candles” is to this movie’s writer-director Sean Anders what John Woo movies are to Quentin Tarantino.
You could divide teen movies into those that show kids as they are and those that show them as they wish they were. “Nick & Norah’s Infinite Playlist” isn’t bad, but it leans to the latter, with all involved being hip and beautiful as they flit from cool club to cool club. “Sex Drive” exaggerates in the other direction but lands a little closer to the mark, which is: the horror, the horror.
SEX DRIVE
Frisky business.
Running time: 108 minutes. Rated R (profanity, nudity, sex, raunchy humor). At the Village East, the E-Walk, the Chelsea, others.