BY MIKEY MIGO
The idea of “Stonerville” is great. Anyone who has ever bullshitted with a friend through a thick cloud of illegal smoke about making a movie has rambled about this idea. The premise is simple. A stoner who makes videos day dreams about and thinks of weird things. It’s all in cut aways and segments. It’s all the weird giggle and cough jokes of being a stoner in today’s world. The dude in the movie, Patrick Cavanaugh, makes videos for the internet. He’s a slacker, his too hot for him girlfriend wants him to do something with his life, and he smokes a lot of weed as the plot falls into his lap. In this case, it’s a strip club owner. He has the dude shoot commercials for his club and all is successful and happy. That’s about it. I’m not spoiling anything because the plot isn’t what we watch movies like this for. It’s a great movie for the ADD kids. There is a lot of randomness all the time. It’s almost like a stoner version of Naked Gun, except not NEARLY as good. Its better comedy than shit like “Epic Movie” and “Date Movie”, but its execution sucks. There is nothing interesting about how the movie looks. It’s low budget and lacks a real form of creativity. The two surprises is that the movie features Leslie Nielsen, which all but confirms that the filmmakers were in fact going for that “Naked Gun” vibe. The second surprise is Pauly Shore showing up in a sports-like announcer role. He’s in a crappy character and his presence takes away from the movie. I’m a huge Pauly fan, but his stuff felt forced and I kept thinking the movie was beneath him. I don’t get it. I’ve seen recent National Lampoon movies better than this and they’ve been just about exclusively shoveling shit now for a good 10 years now. Wiki says they had a 400K budget, they had Pauly and Neilsen, and the concept should have resulted in a stoner cult classic. I wasn’t asking for too much. My expectations weren’t too crazy. I wanted a funny movie to be amused by. Not all stoner movies are Cheech and Chong or Harold and Kumar. I get that. I’ve seen “Evil Bong”, “Pot Luck”, “Smileyface”, and other stoner-riffic low budget comedies. These are all better than what we end up with in Stonerville. It’s not horrible, the movie does wear its heart on it’s sleeve. It’s just not that good. Luckily, if you watch this movie how I think it was intended to be watched you won’t remember much of it the next day. Watch it if you have A LOT of time… and weed… to burn. D
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