Someday, I’d like to see an accounting of movie weddings. I swear the fail rate is exponentially higher and reared its ugly cabeza otra vez in the first ten minutes of the sequel No Manches Frida 2. Did I say “sequel” without an adjective? Darn. Meant to say terrible, no-good, very bad sequel No Manches Frida 2. The awful begins with rival bachelor/bachelorette parties, one involving a strip club and the other involving charades – can you guess which gender held which? The bride, Lucy (Martha Higareda), an anal-retentive Clark, warns her emotional-child groom Zequi (Omar Chaparro) not to get loaded at his stripper party. So when Zequi projectile vomits on the JOP – a joke that still hasn’t improved since The Exorcist – Lucy knows Zequi lied and walks out on the spot. That’s one Hell of a commitment, both of you.
These two are both teachers at Frida Khalo High, home of the Fighting Unibrows. For some reason, they’re both at school the very next day – you both assumed the honeymoon would fall through? Geez, and I thought I was cynical. Of course, there are only five teachers in the school, so these two taking a honeymoon fortnight off would account for a class reduction of 40%, and what would the kids talk about if they weren’t jabbering about the bachelor/bachelorette parties or the wedding they attended? Is it normal to ask your students to attend your wedding festivities?
Sooner or later, the plot had to arrive and it does in the form of the new sheriff in town. FKHS gets a new chief to address the school’s abysmal performance. If the school doesn’t shape up, it will be disbanded. OK, so what the yardstick for improvement? I kid you not – the students have to win the spring break resort school competition. Yes, whether or not Frida High dominates beach volleyball will determine whether or not the school will exist next fall.
Oh, it gets better. This idiot plot hasn’t even begun to unravel. The school has no teacher to guide the pivotal dance competition. Keep in mind that if they lose, everybody is out of a job. So Zequi, trying to get back in Lucy’s good graces, volunteers to teach the dance, which will be performed on stage in less a week’s time. Of course, Zequi thinks he’s singing up to be volleyball coach, something nobody corrects him on until everybody has arrived at the beach and already spent a night. Gee, Lucy, Principal, fellow teachers, what do you think of putting the most irresponsible adult in charge of the most important competition – one I might add, he’s not even slightly qualified to lead?
Did I say it gets better? It does. At the resort, Lucy runs into an ex who is twice the man Zequi is and just so happens to be the coach of the rival dance team – the team that is very prepared to wipe their collective ass with Frida High if this were a genuine competition.
So, hey, teens on a beach, trumped up competition with ridiculously overblown consequences, horny adults to rival horny teens — congratulations, you made a 1980s raunchy sex comedy without being 1980s, raunchy, sexy, or comic.
There are so many bad moments from this dumbass Revenge de los Nerdos that I don’t know quite where to begin. This really was one of those “who thinks this is funny?” movies. Are we still laughing at tired scenes where a scorned lover overcompensates to get the girl back? How about the set of jokes where the fat kid is clearly the least talented and least hip member of the group? Not your thing? Try this one – the bad teacher draws inspiration from improvisational, fabricated, and decidedly false history lesson. Does that do anything for you? I’m amused that Mexicans identify more with Aztecs than Spaniards, btw. Try getting American kids to identify with Native American tribes ahead of their European conquerors. Good luck with that.
One moment I did enjoy very much from the film is when the kids sneal off after hours to a disco and two alphas pick a fight with two rivals. It starts off as You Got Served, but when our kids are up to strut their dance moves, they simply deck their rivals and a brawl ensues. That’s a take on the Served genre I hadn’t yet seen. Of course, it means the dance coordinator did even less work in the film than one might have guessed … which in turn exaggerates the FKHS strip-club inspired finale. (Zequi went with what he knows, see?)
As a friend pointed out to me recently, five of the past six Best Directors at the Oscars have been Mexican. Here, I wanted to point at Nacho G. Velilla as an example that “Mexican directors can suck, too,” only to discover that Velilla is Spanish, not Mexican. So although No Manches Frida 2 is clearly set in Mexico, I cannot blame a Mexican director on the awful. And it is awful. No Manches Frida was a cute Beauty & the Beast kind of tale, but there was nada reason to believe the formula would work a second time. Turning it into a sexless sex comedy, however, made it that much worse. Early vote for worst film of the year.
There are some horns that one must toot
Like the labor that went into this shoot
With all the care
Put to said affair
Cannonball Run could get a reboot
Rated R, 102 Minutes
Director: Nacho G. Velilla
Writer: Claudio Herrera, David S. Olivas, Sergio ‘Venado’ Sanchez [sorry, Sergio, I only honor nicknames for tertiary writers of non-crap]
Genre: The 80s called, it wants its bad comedy back
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Joe Piscopo, maybe?
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Real life teachers, I imagine
