Fifty Pills

Impressions before seeing it
I thought the concept had potential (pipsqueak has 24 hours to sell 50 pills of ecstasy to pay his college tuition), but to be honest the trailer didn't do it any favours. Gave it a shot because it was in a bargain bin for a mere three dollars.

How was it?
This is somewhat irrelevant, but the poster above is used for the DVD cover as well, and what bothers me about it is that they apparently didn't even have the budget to take promotional photos for packaging, because most of those poorly photoshopped figures were clearly taken directly from screencaps from the movie. It looks tacky, but it does demonstrate that we're dealing with a tacky movie.

There are a small number of things to enjoy about this movie, but I'll get to that in a moment. I think from the beginning, it betrays itself with a lack of consistency. I'm referring to a convention wherein Darren (Pucci) directly addresses the camera rather than use voiceover, but then once everything that needed to be explained was explained, he just stopped doing it. The movie was slightly better for it because I found it annoying, but I think if you're going to have a character talk to the camera and it's not a quick meta joke, they should be doing it through the entire movie, like Wayne's World. It's too weird and incongruent to do it for the first few minutes and then go back to ignoring the camera like a regular movie. I also want to say that this movie was made about six years ago but it screams 1990's. I think it's the sub-par acting and writing that makes it feel outdated, combined with some teen sex humour that hasn't been funny since the first American Pie movie. I'm talking "parents walking in on son masturbating" type stuff, followed up with "parents are mistakenly convinced son is gay." Yup, real comedy gold here. Did I mention this movie also includes a dominatrix character? Because for some reason, every single teen sex comedy movie has to have a dominatrix in it. And this isn't even a teen sex comedy. That's what bothers me most about those things being in the movie: they're completely irrelevant to the main storyline, and skew Fifty Pills toward a different genre when it would have worked better as either a straight drama or a quirky indie comedy that didn't need to dip into the well of immature jokes.

Because - and now we're into the positive stuff - there were things I genuinely found funny. Mainly, those things were Michael Pena (who I suspect might have improvised a lot of his lines and that's why he was so funny) and, surprisingly, Eddie Kaye Thomas as a wacky dude obsessed with Diff'rent Strokes who is very enthusiastic and talkative when high on ecstasy. More recent comedy work from Pena makes him less of a surprise, but I think when Eddie Kaye Thomas is one of the highlights of your movie, it's either a bad sign for the movie or a brilliant effort from Eddie. Sorry, Eddie, I believe in the former.

Recommendation
I can't generally recommend this because it's mostly poorly made, but I'm adding a fine print which says that if you find it on TV for free, take a look just to get some laughs out of Pena and Thomas. Jane Lynch is in it too, but her talents are wasted here.