#320: Hooking Up

Release Date: March 6th, 2009

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Jeff Siegel

Directed by: Vincent Scordia

1 Star

Hooking Up is a degenerative, straight-to-DVD teen-sex comedy with no redeeming values.

It’s unfunny and hideous. Viewers beware.

Screenwriter Jeff Siegel sees American Pie’s level of raunch and raises it with depictions of statutory rape and various forms of sexual assault, often played for laughs. I felt bad for the young actors here, who I’m sure were willing to tolerate a lot in order to get a speaking role and share billing with washed up actors like Corey Feldman and Bronson Pinchot.

Speaking of Feldman, he plays “Ryan,” the abusive 25-year-old boyfriend (in real life, Feldman was approaching 40 years old) of 16-year-old Caroline (Alison Whitney). At various points in the movie Ryan slaps Caroline around, pressures her into oral sex, shames her into stripping for his friends, and generally makes her feel like garbage. Hasn’t Feldman been piggybacking on the Me Too Movement in recent years, as an advocate for survivors of child sexual abuse? Apparently that wasn’t much of a priority for him back in 2009.              

Siegel’s script expects us to witness abusive sexual acts one moment, and then the next, laugh about teen boys talking about masturbation. It’s terrible writing. 

And it’s all packaged for us by director Vincent Scordia in some truly horrendous looking digital photography. It’s difficult for me to name a worse looking movie.

If, if, there is one reason to watch Hooking Up, it’s for its completely bizarre conclusion, in which Ryan tries to pressure Caroline into a threesome and she storms out of the house. In a wild tonal shift, the final shot of this gross teen-sex comedy is of her sadly walking down a suburban street as emo rock plays and the end credits start to roll. 

Truly awful filmmaking.