Sex and slaves

I Want Candy is a British sex comedy, which should already sound alarm bells, but I will plough on heroically, as is my nature. It’s about two lads from Leatherhead — wannabe producer Joe (Tom Riley) and earnest auteur Baggy (Tom Burke) — who are still at film school yet are desperate to break into the big time. Frustrated by their arty film teacher (Mackenzie Crook) they head to London to sell their script, Love Storm. Eventually, they encounter a porn producer (Eddie Marsan) who says, OK, I’ll give you the money so long as you up the hard-core element and get porn queen Candy Fiveways (Carmen Electra) for the starring role, which, amazingly, they duly do. They then proceed to film Love Storm in Joe’s suburban house while his mum and dad are at work. Funny? Not a bit of it. Hilarious, then? Nope. Not for a nano-second. All I will say is this: if you’ve a free evening and have the choice between seeing this film or, say, shifting the fridge so you can have a really good mop underneath, there has to be more amusement in the fridge option. And at least you’ll feel virtuous afterwards rather than, well, queasy.

I Want Candy is puerile in a way that aims towards American Pie, if such can be called an ambition, but even falls well short of that. Amazing, I know, that anything could be sub-American Pie, but here you have it. There are semen jokes and blow-up-doll jokes, but laugh? I thought I’d never get started, and I didn’t. But apart from the unsophisticated, unfunny gags? Well, in that case, I feel duty-bound to report that minus those it is only predictable, derivative, tedious, distasteful, badly written, stupid, insulting to women, insulting to Eastern Europeans, clichéd, woefully directed and woefully acted all round.