'Project X' fails in every endeavor

Boys gone wild: Jonathan Daniel Brown, left, Thomas Mann and Oliver Cooper play high-schoolers who try to boost their social status by throwing a big party. (Credit: By Beth Dubber, Warner Bros. Pictures)

Project X (* out of four, rated R, opens Friday nationwide), a movie about a teen party gone horribly wrong, would be every parent's worst nightmare if it weren't so inane.

It's billed as a comedy, but there's not a laugh to be had during the frenetic mayhem. There is also no plot beyond debauchery, nor characters beyond cardboard cutouts. Basically, it's a setting, and a familiar one: a suburban home teeming with drunken, druggie, hedonistic, irresponsible high-schoolers.

Herein lies a heinous, misogynistic movie filled with faceless crowds and nary a character who resembles an actual human being. Then there's a ridiculously corny romantic ending, à la John Hughes movies, tacked on as if to atone for all that went before.

As a spoof, it fails miserably. Its one-note concept is carried out in the most derivative fashion, employing the overused "found footage'' technique (Cloverfield, Paranormal Activity movies), in which someone has a camera rolling within the film, documenting every casual conversation, as well as every catastrophe, as it occurs. Here, it simply provides an excuse for muddy-looking camera work.

A shy guy named Thomas (Thomas Mann) is having his 17th birthday, and his supremely annoying pal Costa (Oliver Cooper) decides to stage a party that will vault their status from dweebs to cool guys who can score with the hottest babes.

Costa sends an e-mail blast and posts the party on Craigslist. That's perhaps the only vaguely fresh element: invitations gone viral. The party draws a couple of thousand boors and bimbos, and nearly every imaginable horror occurs, including a Mercedes sunk into a swimming pool and a neighborhood set on fire. Almost every terrible outcome is predictable.

As supposed evidence of originality, a dwarf is stuffed into the oven and the family dog is set aloft with helium balloons. Amid the carousing are the requisite jokes about coitus interruptus and defecation.

Perhaps a better title would have been There Will Be Vomit.

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