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Just as artist Sam (Chad Donella) is beginning to feel the whole world crashing down on him, this
girl appears on the scene with a smile that beguiles him. They talk, they laugh, they kiss, she gives him her telephone number and zinggg!, he's alive again. He swears she is the girl of his dreams, and her name, Hope (Erin Bartlett), certainly adds intensity to his fire. They part with a promise to meet again. He pursues her, but woe of woes, she suddenly turns mysteriously lukewarm, and Sam is obsessed with unearthing the reasons. Enter Annie (Jennifer Morrison), Hope's next-door neighbor, and envelopes Sam with her empathy as she tries to get the two together again.
Girl Fever is a cutie-cutie love story told in a vulgar language and an awful lot of obscene gestures. There's a story all right, though it is so ordinary that it cannot pose so great a challenge to the acting abilities of the cast. Besides, it's supposed to be a lighthearted comedy, thus it won't be surprising if the viewer now and then gets the sneaking suspicion that the actors are hardly acting at all but could just be playing themselves.
The R-18 rating for Girl Fever
could mislead audiences to presume that it can be lumped together with the other R-18s currently showing, like Hubog, Tatarin,
etc. There are no steamy bed scenes here, but the men's dialogue reeks of locker room jokes, with matching body language that reflects a sickness of mind which is better treated in a psychiatric ward to spare the innocent public. That is the harm that some comedies can do: treat such things as love and neuroses in the same tongue-in-cheek way, as though they merited no more serious consideration than pimples or dandruff.
(Date reviewed: January 11, 2002)
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