Review of Dirty Love

Dirty Love (2005)
1/10
Jenny's Ego Run Amuck
11 March 2006
This unbelievably awful film was awarded the Razzie Award for the worst movie of 2005, and it's awfully hard to disagree with the decision. It is a shameless monument to McCarthy's ego, as her badly written screenplay is designed exclusively to provide a showcase for her tiresome brand of toilet humor and self indulgent mugging that makes Jerry Lewis look restrained by comparison.

But as bad as McCarthy's script and performance are, she isn't helped by then-husband John Mallory Asher's heavy-handed direction or Eric Wycoff's brutal cinematography, with unforgivingly harsh lighting that shows off every imperfection in the actors' faces and robs McCarthy and Carmen Electra their usual saving grace as eye candy.

The most remarkable scene was McCarthy at a grocery store buying tampons when her period kicks in. She starts running through the store leaving a dripping trail of menstrual fluid, which ultimately becomes a massive pond of the stuff that she slips in and is finally covered by. It wasn't the least bit funny and quite sickeningly tasteless.

The cast is uniformly awful, with the lone exception of Eddie Kaye Thomas as the plain fellow who is devoted to McCarthy. He steals the film with the sole characterization that doesn't descend into cartoonish self indulgence. Of course with a movie like "Dirty Love," that can be considered petty theft.

But the price of admission was worth the DVD audio commentary by McCarthy and Asher (who comes off as a clueless fool who was a periphery character on the set), one of the most outlandish displays of narcissism and self-delusion I was ever witnessed. They were constantly congratulating themselves on their own brilliance, and oblivious to the fact that the movie was a god-awful mess. The funniest part was three minutes before the film ended, McCarthy announced that she had another appointment and actually walked out of the taping to let her husband finish up! He had nothing to say except to reiterate how brilliant Jenny was, a conclusion that the vast majority of viewers of "Dirty Love" will disagree with.
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