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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 1.85:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL )
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • German: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • Russian: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  Subtitles
    English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Russian, Arabic
  Extras
  • Deleted scenes
  • Audio commentary - Director Tom Brady
  • Featurette
  • Music video

The Hot Chick

Buena Vista/Buena Vista . R4 . COLOR . 100 mins . M15+ . PAL

  Feature
Contract

The latest DVD release from alleged comedian Rob Schneider, The Hot Chick, brings up many what-ifs...

What If... An asteroid ten kilometres across had struck Earth two years ago and wiped out civilisation? I wouldn’t have had to watch this film this week.

What If... I didn’t choke when I was invited to try out for the Pan-Pacific shot-put team back in high school? I might have become a professional elite athlete who was too busy to write reviews or go to the movies, saving me from having to watch this film this week.

What If... Time-travel were possible? Right after going back and seeing what killed the dinosaurs, whether Jesus Christ really existed, who built the pyramids and what really happened at Roswell, next item on the list would be to go back and introduce Schneider’s mother to the benefits of lesbianism, so that he’d never been born and thus saving me from having to watch this film this week.

What If... 35 years ago upon the birth of their daughter, my parents decided that they were sick of having kids and bought a television instead, so that the next child they would have had (me) would never have been born at all, saving me from having to watch this film this week.

So many possibilities, so little hope. You can engrave that on my headstone when I die (right under “Hmm, maybe this wasn’t such a good idea after all...”), assuming there’s enough of me left to bury when I die, because I always pictured that the investigators at the scene of my death would say “Hey Sarge, what’s left of this guy we could glue to a postage stamp and mail back to his family.”

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What Rob Schneider was doing when he thought up this film.

Yes, film is a powerful medium, it has the power to uplift the spirit, the power to soothe the soul, the power to inspire you to create and in the case of The Hot Chick the power to make you want to go to the toilet and take a dump.

And that’s just one thing I can think of that would be a better way to spend 100 minutes.

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What Rob Schneider will be doing in 1 year.

So the plot (ha ha, yeah, it’s got a plot, sure, and I’m actually a talking can of spam) concerns your everyday clichéd up-herself vindictive teen Ms. Popularity cheerleader type cow who switches bodies accidentally with a scumbag crook (Schneider, naturally) when they both inadvertently wear cursed earrings. You get that bit? Cursed earrings. Remember that, because if you ever see another review mention “cursed earrings” just reach for that carving knife beside you and make a single deep cut across your throat from ear to ear, okay? If you’ve done it right, there’ll be a pool of blood on the desk in front of you. Then, as long as no-one interferes, you’ll probably die. Yes, “cursed earrings” are a sign of the desperate, and possibly also a sign of the coming apocalypse. My kooky in-laws say it’s written in the Bible, so look it up.

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What Rob Schneider will be doing in 2 years.

Schneider and bimbo then spend the rest of the film coming to grips with their little problem, and trying to find a way to swap back again. You have to sit through endless jokes about girls saying to other girls “Hey, can I see your dick?” and the sight of Schneider finally getting to legitimise his fetish for wearing teenage girl clothing. It’s not a pretty sight. I hope he burns in Hell for it.

If you found any of Schneider’s previous flicks funny, then you should be neutered. No, seriously, did you think he was funny? I mean, I laughed once or twice during The Hot Chick, but not at him.

“But Vince, you’re saying this film is rubbish and now you say you laughed. What gives?”

Ah, thought you caught me out, didn’t you? Well, I’m always one step ahead of you, oh shifty reader of mine. Seriously, I really am. I know where you live. I’ve been standing outside your bedroom window for days now. But no, I didn’t laugh in amusement. Perhaps it’s better to say I was ‘bemused'. Bemused at the fact that we, as a people, not as say... iguanas, would feel the need to tolerate cinematic fare such as The Hot Chick, when the rental stores and cinema screens are positively overflowing with quality entertainment crafted with infinitely more skill and honed with a long nurtured talent and a devotion to furthering their noble profession, not to showing us how a girl would take a leak if she had a penis.

No, stay away from The Hot Chick I say. No good can come from a union with this diseased tart of a DVD.

  Video
Contract

I’d expect a better looking picture for a film made last year, but it is a lowish budget hackjob for a talentless moron, so I’ll try to keep that in mind.

I have to say I was a little underwhelmed with the look of the picture, and I thought that it didn’t live up to the old over-abused axiom of shit film, great picture. Probably what dragged it down for me is that it looks fairly dull. It has plenty of colour, with colourful clothing and busy colourful sets, but the picture looks like it needs a good wipe with a cloth to remove a layer of dust off the top which is stopping it from really shining. This haziness is related to, or caused by, the next problem, which is the brightness level of the picture.

Whether intentional or not, the picture/transfer is simply far too bright. Every scene looks over-lit, and the brightest parts of the picture often have the detail washed right out, which can be seen fairly frequently on any thing that is white or very bright, such as the exterior of the house, the seating at the football ground, a yellow car and even on some ice-cream.

The news isn’t all bad, as it does look very clean and I must say the crew have done a nice job of shoving this mess onto the dual layered disc without any little compression related thingymajigs showing their little ugly digital heads.

I had a strange subtitle issue though. A couple of times during the film, the German titles switched on and displayed text. It did the same thing with my software DVD player on the PC, so I guess it’s a problem on the disc.

  Audio
Contract

The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio track at 448kbps is typical, doing all the usual things this kind of film puts a system through. Primarily plonked front and centre, it occasionally breaks out for a bit of rahrahrah when the boppy soundtrack calls in for a bit of play, or during the cheerleading bits with some wraparound pulling in the effects and surround channels to open things up. Nothing outstanding occurs, nothing drastically bad sticks out, it’s perhaps a little ‘blah’ for my liking. But then, then film is completely ‘blah’ anyway, so it’s not like I really care one way or the other. How’s that for being objective, eh?

  Extras
Contract

And then, to torture me, the stupid DVD goes and has a whole bundle of extras for me to have to wade through, clogging up my galoshes with rotting left over scenes and pointlessly padded behind the scenes material. And people say there’s no such thing as karma.

15 Deleted Scenes
In fact, it’s really 13 deleted scenes, one extended scene and one alternate ending. There’s nearly an extra third of a movie here, and all of it as dull as what they left in. They could have swapped the deleted scenes and the film around, and no-one would have noticed the difference. It also gives you an impression that the director had no idea what he was doing and was just shooting everything he could think of, because there’s no way that anyone with half a clue would have had a two hour plus film in mind with such a shit subject matter and Rob Schneider in mind.

Audio Commentary – Director Tom Brady
The guy who is responsible for this mess actually felt that he had to explain how he made it? Why?

Music Video – Starlight by ZED
This clip for a bland, soul-less ditty features even more Schneider, just in case you haven’t had enough of him yet. Here’s a question the clip brings to mind: What’s with the way guitarists stand with their legs about two metres apart? Is the guitar really heavy? Are their testicles really sore? What is it? Enquiring minds want to know.

Featurette – Becoming Clive (04:59)
This highlights how actor Rachel McAdams played the part of a guy stuck in a female body. There is very little real content in here, more just a collection of scenes from the film and behind the scenes clips. But Rachel is sooooo easy on the eyes, I could play this maybe four or five times before I got bored of looking at her. The biggest crime is that she probably gets about five minutes of screen time in the film, with all the focus going on the Schneider character instead. It’s a bloody disgrace!

Featurette – Becoming Jessica (08:40)
Oh boy. We’re lucky enough to watch even more clips and behind the scenes footage of Schneider act like a dick pretending to be a girl. One guy from the film, who might be in his early 20s at best, comments that Schneider is able to uncannily act like a real 18 year old girl. This guy has clearly never seen a girl of any age, because 18 year old girls are simply not as stupid as this film portrays them. I guess it’s sometimes true that actors should be seen, not heard.

Featurette – The Hot Chicks (08:26)
Exclusively about the training and shooting of the cheerleading scenes (which are such a small part of the film) I’ll be amazed if you can watch one minute before fast forwarding through the rest. I couldn’t. This featurette tells you that the people who made the film are a bunch of perverts who only wanted to make the movie so they could legitimately get footage of young girls on film without being arrested.

Featurette – Physical Education (09:04)
Looks at the physical comedy/stunts in the film, comprised of mostly behind the scenes footage as they set up and shoot the falls and such.

  Overall  
Contract

Somewhere in Africa, a small child called Mobatu is starving. He lives in a stick hut with a dirt floor. He has no arms, he works 22 hours a day cleaning fungus from elephant bottoms earning four cents a week to support his family of 15. Yesterday, his father left his mother for a goat.

Please, send your money to him instead of buying or hiring this crap.

Let Mobatu know you care enough to make a difference.


  • LINK: http://www.dvd.net.au/review.cgi?review_id=2867
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      And I quote...
    "The Gods can be cruel sometimes. As evidence, I present Exhibit A: The Hot Chick."
    - Vince Carrozza
      Review Equipment
    • DVD Player:
          Sony DVP-525
    • TV:
          Philips 55PP8620
    • Receiver:
          Sony STR-DB1070
    • Speakers:
          Wharfedale s500
    • Centre Speaker:
          Polk Audio CS245
    • Surrounds:
          Wharfedale WH-2
    • Subwoofer:
          DB Dynamics TITAN
    • Audio Cables:
          Standard Optical
    • Video Cables:
          standard s-video
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