No matter what their malady—major or minor—Victorian-era women frequently received a medical diagnosis of “hysterical” (usually followed by a curt wave out the door).
Has Baron Cohen’s shtick jumped the shark? His latest “outrageous” character looks, at first glance, like his weakest: a decades-in-power Arab despot with a skanky beard who rules with an iron fist.
The setup sounds as generic as they come: Five horny young people make their way out to the proverbial title retreat for some fun, but there is an evil force out there in the boondocks, waiting to prey upon them.
So long as beloved shoutyman Will Ferrell is raging like a perturbed four year-old, he can appear in anything—say, a Spanish-language telenovela Western—and we’d probably line up.
Hollywood continues to dust off insignificant detritus from the eighties crap rack where it belongs, and with this ancient Johnny Depp–Fox TV vehicle, they may have finally turned over the last, um, sun-bleached VHS box.
What The Blair Witch Project did for horror movies and Cloverfield did for giant-monsters-stompingon-Manhattan flicks, this handheld-camera comedy hopes to do for the all-night rager.