Virgin Territory (2007)

It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Like the great film, it's made with a great deal of visible affection both in front of and behind the camera.

"Virgin Territory" is a silly, lame and unfunny film, where the sexy women and their breasts are the only entertainment (at least for the male viewer). The plot is a complete mess with scenes without any explanation. For example, why is Elissa naked in a lake seducing the Russian count? Or when Pampinea felt in love with Lorenzo? There is no chemistry between them. The narrative is also boring. Why Tim Roth and Hayden Christensen (after performing Anakin Skywalker in Star Wars) accepted to work in this film is the greatest question. My vote is five.Title (Brazil): "Território Virgem" ("Virgin Territory")

A young man engages in debauchery and swashbuckling adventures in 14th century Italy. This film is mostly harmless, but an incredibly lame attempt to make a sex comedy set during the time of the Roman Empire as Europe is devastated by the Black Plague. The script and direction are so amateurish that it looks like a low-budget TV movie. It is difficult to buy Christensen as a swashbuckling hero, as he looks about twelve and has little screen presence. Roth looks embarrassed to have become involved with this project. The only selling point here is that there are some quite attractive women in the cast and they tend to disrobe with some regularity.

I was shocked to see that this movie scores so low on IMDb, it is definitely one of my personal favourites.The plot seems to be the problem for most of the reviewers who didn't like the film. Well, what can I say other than it was taken right out of Boccaccio's famous Decamerone. Boccaccio being one of the most famous of all Italian writers EVER, and yes, he loved sexy, dirty stories with lots of rather ridiculous characters. (His works are available on Project Gutenberg.)What I like about it? It's tastefully sexy (yes, I love beautiful nudes), it contains some interesting characters like Tim Roth as Gerbino de la Rata, I especially like the first encounter with Count Dzerzhinsky and their exchange of words, Count Dzerzhinsky himself in his overly self-assured way, seems pretty cool too. The scene with the milkmaids in the cowshed is excellent too, revolutionizing pornography by giving the facial to the men (finally...)Comparing the movie to American teenage flicks like 'American Pie' is definitely an insult that I mind very much. It's about like comparing a Ferrari with a Chevrolet Avalanche.No, it's not deep, but does a movie have to be to be good??? Can it just be fun to watch?

If the folks who made A Knight's Tale all impregnated a sibling and the genetically defective results of those unions all grew up to make an anachronistic, Renaissance Italy sex comedy, it would look an awful lot like Virgin Territory. There's some quality nudity here but an almost total lack of laughs and a host of poor storytelling choices.Lorenzo (Hayden Christiansen) is a young gambler in love with the beautiful Pampinea (Mischa Barton) and on the run from the rich and menacing Gerbino (Tim Roth). Pampinea is also lusted after by Gerbino, even though she's promised in marriage to a Russian count (Matthew Rhys). Lorenzo has to flee Florence to escape Gerbino and his men. Pampinea, some of her friends and a painter impersonating a priest (Craig Parkinson) also decide to leave town, partly because of Gerbino and partly because of the plague.Lorenzo and Pampinea end up in a convent full of sex-crazed nuns while her friends wind up waylaid by some bandits. After some generalized ribaldry, including a police-style penis line up, everybody winds up at a country villa where Gerbino tries to force Pampinea to marry him while Lorenzo and the Russian count try to stop it. The bad guy falls down a well and everybody else locks lips with the sex partner of their dreams.I think I've seen enough film to make a plea. For the love of Zeus, stop with all the voice over narration! It's fairly rare in big budget Hollywood fare, but narration has overrun indy flicks like out of control kudzu. It's one of the laziest crutches filmmakers lean on and you find it over and over and over again in independent cinema. Whether it's used as a shortcut for exposition, characterization and plot mechanics or as a feeble attempt at depth and profundity that doesn't exist in the rest of a script, narration has become so common in a certain class of filmmaking that it's almost become a big, fat warning sign. If you're watching a movie and you hear a narrator within the first 30 seconds, you're probably better off bailing on the film right then and there.That's what I should have done when the voice over from the fake priest started in Virgin Territory. It's intrusive, it takes the audience's attention and emotional investment away from the main characters and, worst of all, the narration is intentionally written to be the most overtly funny thing in the movie. The fake priest is given more deliberately humorous things to say in his narration than all the other characters' dialog put together. The narration isn't all that funny but even if it were, it would still be a mistake to do it that way.The rest of Virgin Territory lived down to that early warning sign. Just as an example, a huge portion of the film's middle is given over to how one of Pampinea's friends is a bitchy cocktease who alternately berates and frustrates her virgin boyfriend. Pampinea, Lorenzo, Gerbino and the Russian count are just forgotten about, and then the cocktease and her boyfriend are forgotten about so a second friend of Pampinea can be brought to the fore and made the second most important female character in the story.And I have to bring up the final sword fight between Lorenzo and Garbino because it's one of the worst structured battles in the history of fiction. First, the movie sets it up that Lorenzo and Garbino will fight and if Garbino wins, he'll then have to fight the Russian count. So the bad guy is facing an unfair challenge to begin with. Then Garbino has to battle Lorenzo on the edge of a deep well after it's been established that Garbino is afraid of heights, putting him at an additional disadvantage. Even if Garbino were the most vile person imaginable, having the deck stacked so clearly against him destroys the good vs. evil dynamic of the climax.Virgin Territory does feature the impressive physique of Kate Groombridge and a few other actresses take their tops off. There's nothing else of value here.