When you view the trailer for VIRGIN TERRITORY, it is clear the marketing department is trying to attract those who went ga-ga over Baz Luhrmann's not totally dissimilar 1996 avant-garde literary adaptation, ROMEO + JULIET, which IMDb users have rated 40 per cent better than director David Leland's hatchet job on Giovanni Boccacchio's centuries-old bacchanalia, THE DECAMERON. When you listen to ancient wind-bag producer Dino De Laurentiis expound on VIRGIN TERRITORY's "Making of . . . ," it's clear his team had one thing in mind: a cheap youth-oriented sexploitation pic. The titillating but hardly relevant retitling of the film is only the first clue to the cringe-worthiness of this non-effort. (I personally prefer the Italian title, DECAMERON PIE, as it some aptly evokes a picture of Boccacchio-style ribaldry devolving to the thoughtless raunch of the endless AMER!CAN PIE movie series.) Within the first few minutes of VIRGIN, someone falls into a pool of excrement, and the dialog is delivered with a constant stream of incongruous accents and anachronistic modern obscenities. Worse yet, the Black Death Plague theme is milked for a few attempts at humor that totally misfire, after which the pretense of a historical setting is abruptly dropped. The lame pretense at religious satire or sacrilege pulls its punch, and the alleged sex scenes are for the most part brief erotic-free zones. Not everyone can pull off Fellini's SATYRICON (1969), but a word to the wise: when you pump out crap like VIRGIN TERRITORY, do NOT crow about it on a "Making of . . . " Rather, take your money and run--fast!
Review of Virgin Territory
