Review of Michelle Trachtenberg's Eurotrip Movie

Fudgehammer Takes A EUROTRIP !! Thursday, December 11, 2003

Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab... Teen comedies. No one has ever gone broke by making them cheap and dumb. What’s nice is when you see one that manages something more. As with every genre, there’s the easy way and the good way, and I’m curious to see which way the makers of this film have gone. Hello Harry, A few weeks ago you posted a photo from the new teen sex comedy, Eurotrip. At the test screening I attended this weekend, it looks like they cut Michelle Trachtenburg lifting up her shirt in that scene, but have no fear, there are plenty of breasts elsewhere for your viewing pleasure.

The film opens on graduation day with high school senior Scott Thomas (Scott Mechlowicz) getting dumped by his girlfriend moments before his parents show up to congratulate him and save this momentous day on video. Feeling down and low, he almost decides to blow off the graduation kegger, but best friend Cooper (Jacob Pitts) persuades him to go, rather than stay home and email his German pen pal, "Mike".

The party is the typical crazy beer fest, and they meet up with "the worst twins ever", their friends Jenny (Michelle Trachtenburg) and Jamie (Travis Wester), who plan on going to Paris for the summer. Just when it looks like Scott may be able to loosen up and have some fun, he finds out that his now ex-girlfriend has been cheating on him with the lead singer of the band playing at the party—a pierced, tattooed, and shaved headed Matt Damon. The song that everyone rocks out to is pretty catchy and becomes a running gag throughout the film. Scott arrives home drunk and depressed, and to cap off the evening, his German pen pal "Mike" wants to fly to the states to meet him since he’s now single. Scott figures his "friend" is not really a friend at all, but a sexual predator, and sends him a nasty email telling him to get lost. Hung over the next morning, he awakes to find his annoying little brother (Don’t all these films have an annoying little brother or sister ?) snooping through his emails. Little brother laughs at older bro’s misfortunes, and adds that "Mike" is actually a female. Seems Scott had thought Mieke was a guy’s name, a German version of Mike. He pulls out a photo Mieke had sent him of a dorky German guy and a hot blond. He thought Mieke was the dude. oops. Too late, he has now been blocked from her email, so he can’t explain the misunderstanding. Cooper shows up and convinces him they should go to Berlin so Scott can apologize to Mieke in person, and Cooper can experience hot European sex.

They meet up with Jenny and Jamie and crisscross Europe trying to reach Berlin while comedy ensues. At one point they accidentally enter a pub that’s the home for a bunch of Hooligans led by the bad ass himself, Vinnie Jones ! There’s also a hilarious scene involving SNL’s Fred Armisen as an Italian guy who tries to molest them on a train. On the way out, I heard various people quoting his "Ex-scuse" line.

Nothing really new in this, but I found myself laughing throughout. I would say the teen sex comedy really got its start in the 80’s with films like Zapped, Fast Times, or any other movie my friends and I would rent to see some naked women. Movies like Spring Break, Hardbodies, Private School, etc. In the 90’s, the nudity seemed to disappear from these kinds of films. Eurotrip doesn’t really go for the gross out moments of recent comedies like Road Trip, American Pie, or the Farrelly Brothers, but it does have A LOT of T & A ! I am wondering if they will still be able to get an R rating with the amount of nudity that’s in it, including a scene of a bunch of naked guys at a beach. The MPAA tends to frown at male frontal nudity, so what will they do when faced with 30+ dongs on the screen ? Nothing’s sacred in this either, from a little boy emulating Hitler to sex in a confessional. My least favorite scene took place in the Vatican, where things got a little too silly and predictable.

The four actors really bring the friends to life. These are people you wouldn’t mind hanging out with, and they have great camaraderie. With the exception of Buffy’s Michelle Trachtenburg, the other three are pretty unknown. Scott Mechlowicz plays it cool for the most part, which makes it even funnier when we see him get silly in a robot fight with a street performer outside the Louvre. DJ Qualls was the standout of Road Trip, and Jacob Pitts is the standout here. He is the wisecracking best friend, and his delivery of even the simplest lines would get laughs. If David Spade had a less smarmy brother, it would be this guy, with a dash of Ferris Bueller thrown in. At first, I didn’t care for Travis Wester’s uptight, almost nerdy, character of Jamie, but he slowly grew on me. Michelle Trachtenburg made me feel like a dirty old man when I watched her on Buffy, and now she is becoming a hot young woman, which they totally play up. This is the film that shows people she is no longer the little girl from Harriet the Spy. She is one of the few women who don’t get nude in this, although we do see her in a bikini and a VERY sexy nightclub outfit....sigh...

One of the few things I didn’t care for was the scenery. Several of the famous locations looked ’off’, like it was green screen or CG. I got the feeling they cheated things and filmed in Canada. I’m curious how much of this, if any, was shot in Europe. That’s a very minor complaint and other than that, I think it’s earned it’s place in the teen sex comedy realm, I just hope the ratings board doesn’t butcher it.

Fudgehammer

p.s. Congrats on your entry into filmmaking ! Can’t wait to see the fruits of your labor.

Thanks, man. The film’s a collaboration between Alec Berg and Dave Mandel and Jeff Schaffer, all of whom worked together when they wrote for SEINFELD, while separately, they’ve worked on things like LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O’BRIEN and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE and CLERKS : THE ANIMATED SERIES. These are funny guys, and with the lovely (if horrifyingly young) Michelle Trachtenberg along for the ride, I’m at least going to give this a look. Fingers crossed, eh ? "Moriarty" out.