Sex Appeal: Movie Review

Teen sex comedy with no comedy and no logic.

Does the world need a teen sex comedy, bordering on the trash of 1980s teen sex comedies, but from the perspective of a smart female student? I can understand why some might be tempted to say yes, but we have Blockers and Booksmart to fill that void with good movies instead. Trash is trash and does not help the fill the void of under-served demographics.		2022 Directed by: Talia Osteen Screenplay by: Tate Hanyok Starring: Mika Abdalla, Jake Short
Avery (Mika Abdalla) is the smart girl in school. But smart beyond reason or plausibility. This is the type of smart character that cannot be written well because they are not based in reality at all. It’s writers dreaming up what a smart student looks like and creating this preposterously successful person who overachieves in school and has a never-ending knowledge of every single subject. She performs experiments on her platonic male best friend – engineering, chemistry, physics – you name it, she’s supposedly a certified genius in every field since she was a toddler. And of course she’s really hot too – Hollywood hot. If you’re going throw reality out of the window from the get-go, I guess there’s no point in trying to create a relatable high school at all. But you also don’t deserve an audience if you’re going to insult our intelligence like this. Avery is entering a STEM competition to create an app that will help improve her every-day life. Enter her long-distance boyfriend who engages in the same extracurricular activities as Avery. Casper (Mason Versaw) has decided that when they are both at the app competition that they should have sex for the first time. We have found the one thing in life that Avery isn’t perfect at – she’s never had sex. So her app is going to detail how to have perfect sex. A ludicrous plot line for a ludicrous lead character. Some of the obstacles you’ll be able to guess: she enlists Larson (her male best friend) to help with this so-called science experiment. He obviously develops feelings for her. She is obviously ignorant to that because book-smart people are emotionally dumb (I don’t why, you’ll have to ask the writers why they insist on perpetuating that stereotype). The development of her app includes watching teen sex comedies, asking her fellow classmates who are just as unrealistic as she is, and asking her parental figures. Ahh yes, that’s where we get the likes of Fortune Feimster and Margaret Cho who are “sex-positive” parents who have a ridiculous amount of vagina paraphernalia around the house. It’s too extreme and not funny. Exactly like the rest of movie. Everything is taken to extremes way outside of reality and nothing is funny after that. If anybody makes it to the end, the rom-com-esque ending is actually refreshing and does fit the movie, which is really surprising since it’s hard to imagine anything good coming out of this mess. The other positive is Mason Versaw as Casper – on-paper you would expect him to be the typical sex-obsessed high school boyfriend, but in his scenes at the app competition he was able to show a very genuine softer side, a boy who is smart and does have feelings and cares about Avery. He deserves a better movie than Sex Appeal which is probably why he has so few scenes.