A truly sad and fantastically cynical facsimile of the original, American Pie 2 should prove too moronic and repetitive for the liking of even those who lapped up the first instalment. The same four lads from said original – Jim (Biggs), Oz (Klein), Kevin (Nicholas) and Finch (Thomas) – have gone their separate ways to college, but the summer holidays see them re-united, renting a beach-house, and lamenting the exact same shit as last time around. Anally retentive Finch is still obsessing about his mate’s mother (Coolidge), Jim is still nervous about being a virtual virgin before his upcoming date with Nadia (Elizabeth), and Jim’s dad (Levy) is still (apparently deliberately) walking in on his son at inopportune moments.

Add to this a series of ‘comedy’ moments – involving golden showers, rectal tromboning, retard jokes, and a scene which seems to postulate that lesbians only exist as a means for providing jacuzzis full of hot girl-on-girl action for heterosexual men – and you have a film which finally can compete with the moment in Ace Ventura: Pet Detective where Jim Carrey attempts to talk through his arse in terms of sheer desperation to generate cheap audience laughs. On that very (depressing) note, however, I must point out that no preview screening I have attended in the last year or two has come even close to eliciting quite the same frequency and consistency of hysterical hyena-like cackling from the audience as American Pie 2:

Though indistinguishable at heart from its Porky’s predecessors – the central idea being that the sight of female mammaries is the most inherently hilarious spectacle on god’s earth – American Pie 2 lacks even the courage of its sexist convictions, cloaking (if only just) its spotty-geek lad-mag outlook behind a desperately unconvincing, clearly insincere but ever-present fear of offending post-PC and post-feminist conventions. Thus, its female characters are filmed in a generally vile Hollywood-exploitation light while given a few lines of dialogue (!!!) here and there to neutralise any accusations of misogyny. This thoughtful and sensitive approach is slightly negated by the fact that all the (allegedly) teenage females are played by seasoned twentysomething Hollywood silicon-and-collagen monstrosities, but hey, it’s only a bit of fun, right?

Not really, no. Sad, in fact.