So what happens when two guys in David Wain and Ken Marino go to write a script about a concept that is so out there that they HAVE to write about it?
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass. That’s what happens.
Zoe Deutch plays the title character, a woman from Kansas who seeks to even the score after her fiancé (Michael Cassidy) cashes in on his “celebrity pass” by going to Hollywood to try and meet up with Jon Hamm under the guise of going to a hairdressing convention with her best friend, Otto (Miles Gutierrez-Riley). On the way, they wind up with SO much more than they bargained for as they team up with some unlikely allies and run across Hollywood together.
Honestly, I can’t give away much more than that without venturing into spoiler territory in a film that prides itself on the absurd from a bunch of the cast of the ‘90s sketch MTV sketch comedy series The State. Having written that last sentence, you should know what you are in for. I cannot deny that I found myself laughing out loud more than once in this film that seems to take a bunch of different sketch ideas and weaves them together in a larger arc that more often than not turns into a trainwreck of a film. Thankfully, this one is the proverbial exception to that rule. It’s silly and goofy and has appearances from some unexpected (and in some cases, logical) co-stars, and while it’s not the Airplane! or Top Secret of its time, it’s just enough to make me say that this was worth the time I spent watching it. (And in case you were waiting for it, this DOES have Coconut Creek High School alumnus Joe Lo Truglio in it as well.)
Familiarity of the cast with each other definitely helps here as well, even from those that have smaller roles but still have those friendships with the filmmakers. Again, I really don’t want to spoil anything, but some of them could be guessed pretty accurately including one of them that you REALLY have to look closely for.
Gail Daughtry and the Celebrity Sex Pass is not a film that you necessarily need to run out to the theater to see, but if you are with a group of friends and really want to have a fun night out at the movies in the midst of just about everything else under the sun genre-wise, it’s a good choice to cap off an evening of fun that will keep the good vibes going for quite a while.