Greetings and welcome back to Raspberry Picking, where we look back at Golden Raspberry Award winners and decide whether they really deserve to be called the worst movies ever. This time, we’re getting down with Dirty Love, nominee for six Razzies, winner of four including Worst Picture, and vehicle of instant suicide for anything and everything that touched it.
I’ve given the Razzies a lot of crap for their disproportionate cruel treatment of attractive women stars. But sometimes, creators just make it too easy for them. Let us take as our first exhibit the case of Jenny McCarthy.
Jenny McCarthy is a former Playboy bunny and MTV game show host and a current enthusiast for quack medicine and anti-vaccine propaganda. We shan’t hold any of these things against her in these pages, because being an idiotic New Age kook doesn’t preclude someone from having filmmaking prowess. On the other hand, please close your eyes, think hard, and try to name a Jenny McCarthy movie. Did you come up with anything other than Dirty Love?
No, I will not be typing “dirtylovefilm.com” into my browser, thank you.
What, you didn’t remember McCarthy from small roles in such beloved classics as The Stupids, BASEketball, Scary Movie 3, and John Tucker Must Die? All good, because it was only in 2004 that McCarthy decided she was ready to be a star. And not just any star, but a star in her very own movie that she was going to write herself. Her husband John Mallory Asher, previously known for a few direct-to-video comedy-crime thrillers, signed on to direct, and the two of them set out to tread a path previously laid for them by John and Bo Derek.
Extremely little information is available about the production of Dirty Love, so any juicy stories about on-set drama or parking lot fisticuffs have alas been lost to history, or at least lost to a more in-depth Google search than I cared to perform. (Asher and McCarthy announced their divorce right around the time of release, so there clearly wasn’t no on-set drama.) McCarthy is on record that one of her goals for the project was to show that women could also do Tom Green-style gross-out comedy. I don’t know that I’d consider that a laudable goal, but hey, a girl gotta strike her blows for feminism how she sees fit, and it’s at least an actual goal, some metric we can use to evaluate the film on its own terms.
Goals.
What we do know is that no one really liked it, on its terms or any other terms. Roger Ebert gave it his coveted “thumbs-down,” and it made a whopping $58,116 against its $9 million budget. Even the critics who tried to be kind to it praised its brazen commitment to bad taste more than they praised anything in the actual film. McCarthy never wrote or starred in another film. Asher never directed another feature. Most of the supporting cast spent the remainder of the existing 21st century languishing in obscurity.
But as we know well in these parts, especially in our frequent and unfortunate eagerness to put female creators in their place, we’ve gotten these things wrong before.
Did we do Dirty Love dirty?
THE STORY
Dirty Love turns out to be the answer to a question that some hubristic people may have asked, but no one wanted answered, namely, “what would Freddy Got Fingered look like if Tom Green had no vision or directorial instincts?”
In a simpler, Godlier time – by which I mean “one month ago” – in these very digital pages, I made the rookiest of rookie mistakes when I said something along the lines of “boy howdy I bet this is the lowest we can possibly go among these Razzie-sweepers.” That may not be the silliest thing I’ve ever said, but it means that my Dirty Love experience ranks pretty high on my personal list of “things I was absolutely asking for.”
Got an extra few of those for me, Jenny?
Dirty Love opens on a credits sequence that looks like it was designed by high school students using PowerPoint text animation. The names wiggle distastefully across the screen in a balloony font the color of grape Kool-Aid, making me wonder not for the last time in this endeavor what, exactly, McCarthy and Asher spent $9 million on.
If the answer was “sets” or “costumes,” they should demand several dozen refunds.
The repugnant credits transition to ultra-grainy home-video footage of various points in the courtship of Rebecca Somers (McCarthy) and her boyfriend, fashion model Richard (Victor Webster), with breathless voiceover narration in which Rebecca tells us how amazing it is to be in love and to know you have found just the right person. I bet you can never guess what’s about to befall her.
We then cut to Rebecca standing on a public sidewalk, repeatedly screaming “OH MY GOD!” in between bits of the revelation that her True Love Richard has been doing the nasty with another gal. Like Prince’s pronunciation of the word “garçon,” McCarthy’s pronunciation of “OH MY GOD” is rabbit-hole fascinating, but for different reasons and to very different effect. She causes this three-syllable phrase to have about eleven syllables. “EHUHOHHHH MAAIIYYY GAAAAAAHHHHDUH” is the best I can do as a visual approximation. She screams it at least nine times, each time adding an extra syllable.
McCarthy, contemplating a career where she might afford herself more dignity.
Anyway, in her desperation, Rebecca consults a dime-store psychic (Kathy Griffin), who tells her that she is doomed to suffer in her quest for true love, but that she will eventually find it with a “white pony.” On hand for support in Rebecca’s journey are her besties, struggling actress Carrie (Kam Heskin) and amateur Carmen Electra impersonator Michelle (Carmen Electra – I think the character is supposed to have a job but I neither remember nor care what it is). Oh, and there’s also John (Eddie Kaye Thomas), a mild-mannered dork who looks like he’s about fourteen and who follows Rebecca around like a duckling follows its mommy. He listens to her weep about her problems and buys her ice cream and urinates on her ex’s couch because he’s just so mad about how Richard treated this princess, this goddess, this vision of perfection. I bet you can’t guess the role John is eventually destined to play in Rebecca’s life.
The “story” part of Dirty Love, before we arrive at the above-implied astonishing conclusion, consists of Rebecca going on various horrid dates with a collection of men who escaped from the pages of a Marquis de Sade first draft. There’s the walking Woody Allen joke (Bob Glouberman) who vomits on her breasts during a fashion show; the magician (Guillermo Diaz) who forces her to order salad and gets her arrested for battery; and a gentleman named Jake (David O’Donnell) who promises to “teach [Rebecca] new things” in the bedroom. These experiences teach Rebecca that getting revenge on her awful ex is incompatible with the peace of True Love. They teach the viewer that revoking the old Hollywood morality codes was a big mistake.
Also, in the movie’s most infamous and completely unnecessary scene, Rebecca runs around a supermarket looking for maxi pads while she menstruates all over the floor as though from a gunshot wound. If that doesn’t make you run off to rent Dirty Love right now, you, along with just about every other human being who has ever existed, are not this movie’s target audience.
That’s…not how you wear them, Jenny.
THE BAD
How to quantify the badness of this movie? Instead of trying, let’s talk for a moment about that Jake fellow from the Story section, because his brief but extremely memorable romp through Dirty Love is a perfect small-scape capture of everything going wrong here.
The events of this scene, approximately in order, are as follows:
- Jake and Rebecca take ecstasy. Rebecca doesn’t like it; you can tell because the camera spends longer lingering on each of the ridiculous faces she pulls. The people making this movie believe this is funny.
- Jake puts on a song that I believe is entitled “I Love My Sex” by Italian DJ Benny Benassi. If not for “I Wanna Be Mike Ovitz” last month, this would be the worst song I’ve ever heard in a movie. The thudding bassline sounds like a loud repeated fart, and the only comprehensible lyrics are someone shouting “SEX SEX SEX SEX SEX.”
- Jake dances to this song in a Buster Bluth-like manner that Rebecca seems to find seductive rather than repulsive, perhaps because of all the drugs. The people making this movie believe this is funny.
- Jake tells Rebecca that he “can’t wait to teach her” new things, and gets a mysterious package.
- Rebecca does not run screaming from his apartment, but instead follows his directive to “wait thirty seconds and then come to the bedroom.”
- During these 30 seconds, which feel like 30 minutes, Rebecca makes Tom Green faces and humps the couch. She also has a hallucination of a piano falling on her. The people making this movie believe these things are funny.
- Rebecca joins Jake in the bedroom, and discovers him on all fours with a fish stuck between his buttocks. “Time to go fishing, Rebecca,” he growls. “Touch my bass. Touch my bass. TOUCH MY FUCKING BASS!”
Touch my bass, do you get it? Because it’s a fish, and it’s in his…
Look, be glad this was the best still I could find of this scene.
Most of the bad stuff in the movie falls into this realm of depressing anti-comedy that has mistaken being immature and gross for being funny and subversive. Heyyyy everybody, you know what’s funny? Butts! Sex! Weird sex! Sex with butts! Sex with butts with weird stuff in the butts! It’s like the whole movie was written not actually by McCarthy, but by a committee of middle school boys hanging out in the locker room. Okay, yes, butts are funny sometimes, but they’re not funny simply because you’ve pointed a camera at them and declared it to be so. Along with what I’d like to believe is most of the audience, I grew out of my belief that “poop teeheehee” was a funny joke sometime around when I started wearing deodorant.
Then there’s the star of the show, the writer and leading lady herself. We can grant McCarthy this: she’s not the worst performer by a long shot, and she makes up for many of her artistic deficiencies with an intense commitment to this project. She is out here thrusting her hips at homeless men and shaking her vomit-covered naked boobs and slip-sliding in menstrual blood and making the absolute dumbest faces every time the camera is pointed at her. In a different movie, that level of commitment would lift her into my good graces. But there’s no substance to her commitment. She’s not building a character or an aesthetic or even a joke. She’s just doing things stuff because it’s disgusting and that’s the kind of movie she wanted to make. That’s a pointless, alienating thing to be committed to.
So McCarthy’s bad but purposefully so. Occupying a completely different reality plane of bad acting is Kam Heskin as Rebecca’s best friend Carrie. I imagine that Kam Heskin is a lovely person with a kind heart, but hand to God, I cannot name a worse onscreen performance off the top of my head. Connie Mason in Blood Feast comes close, and for similar reasons, but she at least has the decency to fade into the background of scenes in which she isn’t talking. Heskin’s approach to acting is to visibly wait for her scene partner to finish a line, and then deliver her own in the most unconvincing manner possible, with the chutzpah of Elon Musk sending typo-ridden Tweets to world leaders. Carmen Electra is also bad, but unremarkably so; Heskin is bad enough to be somewhat magnetic, but she lacks the powerful anti-charisma key to a truly great bad performance, so it just comes off as intrusive and irritating.
Oh, you’re here! Is the movie still happening?
Of course, it may have helped some if Heskin had had a director. John Asher clearly can’t be arsed to pay attention to anyone in the movie besides his soon-to-be-ex-wife. He has no conception of framing, blocking, or lighting a shot; everything is either too bright or too dark, actors jostle around the screen like they’re all trying to escape (understandable), and the frequent medium close-ups are awkwardly positioned so that whoever is supposed to be in the frame looks like they’re sliding away. The whole thing has a rushed, aw-screw-it quality; for the life of me, I have no idea where that $9 million budget went.
THE GOOD
Right, this part.
I suppose a nice thing about Dirty Love is that I don’t have to stretch as painfully as I was afraid I was going to to identify the “good” elements of the movie. Here’s where understanding the terms by which the movie wishes to be judge comes in handy: I can at least identify the places wherein it succeeds at being that thing, few and far between though they are, and I can even identify two of those places that didn’t make me want to egg Jenny McCarthy’s house on the way out.
The first is Rebecca’s early scene in the lair of the Kathy Griffin psychic. This scene achieves its goals. It belongs very solidly in a low-grade girl-driven romcom. McCarthy and Griffin have enjoyable onscreen presence together and play off each other very well, making McCarthy’s juvenile “white pony” conceit almost sound like a writer came up with it. Griffin has always had a knack for ridiculous characters, and I wish her one-scene wonder had been in more of the movie. On the other hand, had she been in more of the movie, she may have worn out her welcome just as hard as everybody else in this infernal thing, so let’s just take our wins where we can get them.
It’s also the movie’s only setpiece upon which lighting decisions appear to have been made.
Anyway…about the infamous Maxi Pad Extravaganza. It may surprise you to hear that I’m willing to count it in the movie’s sad, malnourished plus column. Please understand, I did not like it. I did not enjoy it. But I did…how to put this…appreciate its construction? It’s one of the very few scenes in the film where I think McCarthy and Asher created exactly what they were going for. Like, they did real, honest yeoman’s work putting the scene together. The shots become longer and wider, alternated with quick close-ups on McCarthy’s frantic “oh shit” mug, as Rebecca’s hemorrhage-level menstrual seepage grows and expands and gets on everything. The gag goes on for such an uncomfortably long time that it’s remarkably close to being funny by the end. Do I want to see anything like it ever again? Not in the slightest. But it demonstrates that McCarthy and Asher together have some understanding of how to create a visual gag, and you know what, there are a huge number of unfunny comedies that do not rise to that level. So let’s give partial credit for effort where it’s due.
I’m being nice and not screencapping what happens almost immediately after this shot.
Speaking of unfunny comedies, poor Eddie Kaye Thomas’s meager career is made almost entirely of these, and his performance in Dirty Love is probably his that I’ve hated the least. That may be down to the function of his character – because he’s supposed to be the manly force of stability in Rebecca’s chaotic life, he’s the only major character not regularly engaged in psychotic behavior. Whatever the cause, he’s a welcome presence onscreen throughout. His appearance in a scene means whatever is about to happen will merely be boring and not stab-my-eyeballs-out-with-overlong-acrylic-fingernails godawful. I guess that’s what counts as “good” around these parts now.
My levels of grace and forgiveness approaches those of Christ.
I was never going to love Dirty Love. My appetite for pee and poop and puke (and period) jokes, be they from the perspective of man, woman, or any other protein-based lifeform, is extremely limited. I’m not sure I respect anything about it, for respect must be earned, but I will certainly acknowledge McCarthy’s apparently fervent belief that she was breaking some kind of ground for rom-coms. So I’m definitely not the target audience for the movie; I’m not sure it has a target audience, because I cannot imagine a person who would want to see this particular combination of things onscreen.
Maybe, but only maybe, teenage male dorks who desired carnal knowledge of Jenny McCarthy in 2005.
Yet I don’t feel contempt for Dirty Love. I might feel better if I did, for contempt is at least a feeling that carries some weight. In my own column on Freddy Got Fingered, I suggested that it might be better if I could simply dismiss Tom Green as a talentless jackoff, but after Dirty Love, I am sadder and wiser. It’s like trying to muster contempt for a broken blender. There’s no point in getting mad at a broken blender; it’s just a piece of product that doesn’t function as it’s supposed to. You throw it in the trash; you don’t spend 90 minutes staring at it waiting for it to do something exciting, because that would be a complete, abject, utter waste of time.
Congratulations, John Asher, Jenny McCarthy, and everyone else involved in the production of this broken blender of a movie. You completely, abjectly, utterly wasted my time.
Quality of Movie: ½ / 5. Asher knows how to point a camera in the direction of something he intends to capture on film, but that’s about it.
Quality of Experience: ½ / 5. It’s excruciating to sit through, and it does not let up on the excruciation for ninety-one whole minutes.
Mandy Albert teaches high school English and watches movies – mostly bad, occasionally good – in the psychedelic swamplands of South Florida. She is especially fond of 1970s horror and high-sincerity, low-talent vanity projects. You can listen to her and her husband talk about Star Trek: Enterprise on their podcast At Least There’s a Dog! You can also follow Mandy on Letterboxd.