The Hot Chick

Hollywood has always had more than its share of ultra-punchable, utterly worthless one-man comedy acts – Eddie Murphy, early Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler’s entire catalogue spring to mind – but it wasn’t until Rob Schneider came along that it could truly be said to have spewed forth a comic more sad, pathetic and pitiable than a million Roy ‘Chubby’ Browns rolled into one.

Known to us already from his previous masterpieces The Animal and Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, Schneider’s general strategy is to aim as far below the lowest common denominator as humanly possible, while extracting mild physical-comedy mileage from his scrawny physique and range of preposterously dweeby facial expressions.

The Hot Chick repeats the formula slavishly, with juvenile sub-Porky’s leering sexism backed up by a strikingly generous supply of piss, fart and shit gags. Fat people jokes, ethnic jokes, queer jokes and paedophile jokes provide the variety – forgivable if they were funny, excruciating when they’re not.

The plot: bitchy high-school teen queen Jessica loses an ancient pair of cursed earrings to sleazebag Clive, then wakes up the following day to find that they have transplanted bodies, and she is in the form of Rob Schneider with the cheerleading contest only days away. Schneider then minces through the proceedings in a variety of microscopic belly-tops like the least successful drag queen in world history, while a cast of D-list female nonentities from such classics as Scary Movie provide wholly unmemorable support.

The real tragedy is that all this almost amounts to an improvement on Schneider’s last couple of outings. But this is beyond embarrasing, beyond awful, beyond anything you’ve ever seen. Unless, as I say, you’ve seen the last two Schneiders.