I know that gen Z has it tough—they’re losing their proms and graduations to the quarantine, they’re on deck to bear the full brunt of climate catastrophe, and they’re inheriting a carcass of a society that’s been fattened up and picked clean by the billionaire class, leaving them with virtually no shot at a life without crushing financial and existential anxiety, let alone any fantasy of retiring from their thankless toil or leaving anything of value to their own children. That’s bad. BUT, counterpoint! Millennials have to deal with a bunch of that same stuff, kind of, PLUS we had to be teenagers when American Pie came out! Fuck/marry/kill: Rudolph Giuliani, Stephen Miller, the guy behind you in chemistry saying, “This one time? At band camp?” nine thousand fucking times per hour for FOUR YEARS MINIMUM. You know you would fuck Stephen and marry Rudy if it meant you got to murder that motherfucker!
What I’m saying is that suffering IS a contest and I DO stand by that and straight teenage boys losing their virginities IS worse than not having breathable air. Okay??????
American Pie absolutely captivated a generation because my generation is tacky as hell. “I have a hot girlfriend but she doesn’t want to have sex” was an entire genre of movies in the ’90s. In the ’90s, people loved it when things were “raunchy” (ew!). Every guy at my high school wanted to be Stifler! Can you imagine what that kind of an environment does to a person? To be of the demographic that has a Ron Burgundy quote for every occasion, without the understanding that Ron Burgundy is a satire? This is why we have Jenny McCarthy, I’m pretty sure, and, by extension, the great whooping cough revival of 2014. Thanks a lot, jocks!
It’s not that I hate every ’90s teen sex comedy. Believe me, as a teen who was not having sex in the ’90s, I needed them to live. I just think a lot of them are bad, and have bad morals, and did bad things to boys’ and girls’ brains, but that doesn’t mean I can’t like them. I was a Can’t Hardly Wait girl myself, and that shit is absolutely radioactive with incel energy. This tension is the stuff of life.
American Pie was the big one, though, and I never got it. I just always thought it was the least charming of the bunch, Eugene Levy and Natasha Lyonne notwithstanding.1 That said, this franchise has made a collective $1 billion. So change my mind, rewatch!!! (Spoiler: it won’t!)
American Pie is about a group of high school boys who make a pact to lose their virginities before they graduate.
Jason Biggs is our main guy, whose problem is that he cannot stop masturbating in front of his parents, which is weird because if there’s one thing I know about teenagers, it’s that they are masters of secrecy! When I was in high school, if I was going to steal an extra Dorito after my mom told me I couldn’t have any more Doritos, I would memorize the exact topography of the Doritos in the bag and the bag’s placement in the snack drawer and I would SILENTLY Jenga a single Dorito out of there and snap the chip clip back in the exact right position to the millimeter and then backflip out of the kitchen like motherfucking Sydney Bristow! Yet Biggs “accidentally” masturbates in front of his parents…three? Four times in this movie? And god knows how many more times later in the franchise! I haven’t watched any of those, but it would be bad storytelling to have your protagonist overcome the defining struggle of his life at the very beginning of his hero’s journey, and for Jason Biggs, that’s masturbating in front of his parents. One might argue that masturbating in front of his parents is Jason Biggs’s entire personality. And one would be almost right, except that he is also 1 percent ruthless objectification of women and 4 percent battery. Jason Biggs looks like a battery.
Chris Klein is a lacrosse jock with a tender heart who is constantly being harassed by Stifler (class clown/bully/sexual success) about how he needs to be pulling chicks the old-fashioned way: by insulting and tricking them.
Kevin(?) has a beautiful girlfriend, Tara Reid, who is not ready to have sex because she wants it to be “perfect” and because Kevin(?) won’t say I love you back. Who even remembered that Kevin, one of the four main characters in this movie, was even a character in this movie? Not me! Is his name actually Kevin? I will not look it up!
Finch is the old soul of the pack, which you can tell because he has fine tastes such as “mochaccinos,”2 lying, and hiding.
Did you realize that only twenty years ago, it was still socially acceptable to make ensemble comedies of all white men who look exactly alike even though one of them is a battery?
Stifler is having a party tonight, and the four pals are sitting around wondering if this will be the night they finally coerce a girl into intercoursing them. Biggs asks what “third base” feels like, and Chris Klein tells him it’s “like warm apple pie.” Is it, though???? Oh yeah, you know, crusty and mushy!
Klein isn’t going to the party because he has a date with a college chick, and he’s been practicing his lines for sex-convincing.
Kevin(?) wonders if tonight is the night that Tara Reid will finally let him break through her flaky crust.
The fourth guy, I forget what he does.
The party opens with a truly virtuosic full-minute-long take of Stifler walking around being a dirtbag, exactly like the car chase in Children of Men but with more Barenaked Ladies. Biggs and Kevin(?) can’t believe it when Sherman, a guy they think is worse than they are, tells them he’s had sex before. The Shermanator is supposedly worse because he is an unappealing chauvinist nerd who wears ugly big jeans, whereas our heroes are…different from that. Biggs tries talking to his crush, Nadia, but beefs it. Meanwhile, on his date with the college girl, Chris Klein tries out the sex line he prepared for 100 percent guaranteed sex: “Suck me, beautiful.” (Jesus, who’s your dating coach—Castor Troy?) The college girl laughs in his face and tells him she’s majoring in “postmodern feminist thought,” which, in the ’90s, was a punch line. Haha! Thinking about feminism! Postmodern—does that word even have a meaning?? She suggests that if he wants to have sex with a woman, he should try being less like a Ying Yang Twin and more like a human being who is normal, nice, and enjoys talking about shared interests or the news of the day. Yeah, right! Nice try, Lorena Bobbitt.
At the party, Tara Reid and Kevin(?) go up to one of the bedrooms where she sucks his dick and then he jizzes into a beer. Stifler kicks them out so he can try to have disrespectful sex with a girl named Sarah in there (“I don’t know if I want to be doing this”—Sarah, hilariously!), but then just when he’s about to successfully badger her into accepting his penis, Stifler accidentally glugs the jizz beer! Guk guk guk right down! And then he realizes that it was jizz beer because it tastes like the inside of Kevin(?)’s balls, so then he supersoaks Sarah with a fire hose of vomit that is also jizz. I’m sorry, I don’t like it either, but it’s all we had for entertainment in the ’90s!!!
I forgot that American Pie popularized the term MILF, and that they made John Cho do it, which is a microaggression. Also, later, Stifler calls the guys cucks! Did American Pie really mainstream both MILF and cuck? Can you put a movie in jail?
The guys wake up, hungover, in Stifler’s living room the next morning and ratify the terms of their four-boy sex pact (god, straight guys are SO GAY):
“Here’s the deal. We all get laid before we graduate.”
“Together, we are the masters of our sexual destiny.”
“This is our very manhood at stake.”
“No longer will our penises remain flaccid and unused! We will fight for every man out there who isn’t getting laid and should be!”
“We will make a stand! We will succeed! We will get laid!”
“Prom is our last chance.”
“All the parties afterwards? Chicks are gonna want to do it!”
That’s the vibe that killed us all, by the way! Buncha white boys sitting around like, “We will fight for every man out there who isn’t getting laid and should be!” Oops, that’s it for the species. Not to get all “postmodern feminist thought” major on you, but the idea that straight white men “deserve” some degree of unfettered access to other people’s bodies and if they don’t get it, they are being robbed of something that intrinsically belongs to them is white supremacist patriarchal capitalist imperialism, dog! People have inherent value regardless of their usefulness to you, sorry! Being able to squeeze as much pleasure or profit as you want out of somebody else’s life or body or labor (or out of any weaker party, any nation, any system, any natural resource), regardless of their security or consent, is not a right, sorry! My bad, but kill every billionaire, metaphorically, I swear! Sorryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!
Alas, the horny-boy sex quest continues. They buy SO MANY CONDOMS. Biggs makes an online dating profile, gets no hits. Klein wonders, “How the hell am I supposed to become this Mr. Sensitive Man?” and then joins jazz choir. Kevin(?) seeks advice from Natasha Lyonne, who tells him, “If you want to get her in the sack, just tell her you love her. That’s how I got duped.” She also says he should try to cause Tara Reid to have an orgasm, and we, as a society, should probably pause and think about how wild it is that men need that info delivered to them as sex advice. Hahaha, Ed Harris, please neurotoxify us ASAP!
Turns out, Chris Klein is actually really into vocal jazz—understandably because singing in a choir teaches you how to connect with others on a profound level, to subsume your ego and truly listen, to create something beautiful out of a collective using only your bodies and your shared understanding of human emotion and the concept of time. Also, another good point, “This place is an untapped resource. I mean, check it out, these vocal jazz girls are hot!”
Klein tries to pass along his newfound wisdom to Stifler:
“All you gotta do is just ask them questions and just listen to what they have to say and shit.”
“I don’t know, man, that sounds like a lot of work!”
He is a horrible person, but there is something soothing about Stifler’s complete self-actualization. Stifler knows who he is and he knows what he wants and he does not question himself. He lives effortlessly within the contours of the life he has chosen. I admire Stifler in this way. I yearn for the kind of certainty that seems to come so naturally to him. May we all someday find the serenity of Steve Stifler, but with, I don’t know, not so many up-skirt video schemes.
Eugene Levy corners Biggs for a father-son sex chat and gives him some sex magazines to teach him about pussy: “Okay, so, uh, this is the female form, and they have focused primarily on the breasts.” I don’t listen to a lot of podcasts (Harry Potter audiobooks aren’t going to listen to themselves on a ceaseless and frankly worrisome twenty-year loop!!!), but I would pay upward of $7,000 per episode for Eugene Levy Describes Shaved Centerfolds.
Finch pays Natasha Lyonne to start a rumor at school that he’s “equipped” because that’s what teen girls are into—huge cocks! These girls are positively IN HEAT over Finch’s rumored dong!
Kevin(?) calls Casey Affleck to get sex tips, and Casey Affleck bequeaths to him “the bible,” a handwritten book of sex information passed down from senior to senior for generations. “Now it’s full of all kind of stuff guys have added over the years” (jizz). Kevin(?) goes and finds the book in its secret hiding place in the library, and first of all it is SO BIG, WHY IS THAT BOOK SO BIG, but second of all, you guys know there are just books about sex in the regular library, right? And they’re probably better, because they were written by adults who have actually had sex? You absolutely do not need to do any of this.
Chris Klein is not just surviving but thriving in jazz choir. He is wearing a cardigan. He is feelin’ it, and he lets the music take control: “Scooby dooby do bop!”
“That was good!” says the choir teacher.
No, it wasn’t!!!!!
“The state competition’s a few weeks away, so keep on it!” says the choir teacher.
They are not going to win the state competition!!!!!
Klein starts flirting with Mena Suvari, one of the choir hotties. She was pretty impressed earlier when he went, “Scooby dooby do bop,” and she can’t wait to see what other steamy surprises this scat king has in his pants!
Uh-oh. Jason Biggs gets home from school and his mother has left a fresh apple pie on the counter. Biggs immediately gets an erection. He pulls down his pants. He clambers up on to the kitchen island and begins making full horizontal love to the hot pie using his penis. In the kitchen. Of his parents’ home! TAKE THE PIE UP TO YOUR ROOM, JASON! This is literally so disrespectful. Do you know how much work it is to make an apple pie from scratch????
Of course, Eugene Levy comes in and finds his only child inseminating a pastry, moaning and twitching and stuff. This is a horror movie. In some weird gesture of male solidarity, Levy’s like, “Well, we’ll just tell your mother that we ate it all.” But, I’m sorry, as a married couple, your first allegiance is to each other. If my husband came home and our son was fucking a pie that I made and he didn’t IMMEDIATELY TELL ME so we could laugh and vomit and call 911 together, divoooooorce!
Mena Suvari asks Chris Klein to prom, but then she sees Stifler doing a sex motion and high-fiving Klein on the lacrosse field, so then she UN-asks him to prom. “I saw you making fun of me with your lacrosse buddies. You are just a jock. No, wait, you’re a jerk.” Nice one.
Kevin(?) gives Tara Reid an orgasm using “the infamous TONGUE TORNADO,” which he learned about in the secret sex bible. (Another entry says, “Know your enemy,” with a picture of a vibrator. Very cool for women!)
Eugene Levy tries to have a postmortem talk with Biggs about the pie incident: “I want to talk about masturbation.”
The purpose of this conversation, Levy explains, is that he wants to make sure that Biggs wants a sex partner and isn’t just content with masturbation for the rest of his life. Is that a real problem? Teenage boys not wanting to fuck enough? Anyway, who cares, it brought us this dialogue:
“I did a fair bit of masturbating when I was younger. I used to call it stroking the salami. You know your uncle Mort? He pets the one-eyed snake five, six times a day.” SAVE IT FOR THE PODCAST, EUGENE.
Back at school, the rumors about Finch are getting sexier than ever. “He’s the guy with the tattoo, right? You know, the eagle and the blazing fire, and all that stuff? Well, if you see him later, will you tell him Courtney says hi?”
Nadia, the exchange student Biggs is darkly obsessed with, asks him if he will help her study. “I have ballet practice; perhaps I could come to your house afterwards, I could change clothes at your place?” A woman changing clothes in the same building as you while you don’t watch? In some cultures (orc, badger, Mar-a-Lago) that makes her your wife! Might as well do whatever the fuck you want to her!
“There’s gonna be an Eastern European chick naked in your house and you’re not going to do anything about that?”
“What am I gonna do, broadcast it over the internet?”
“Yeah!”
“You can do that?”
NO, YOU CAN’T!!!! YOU ABSOLUTELY CAN’T!
This is one of the most fucked-up things to happen in any movie. It is so so so so so so so so so so so fucked up. Porky’s is bad, but at least peeping through a hole is purely analog sexual exploitation. Jason Motherfucking Biggs nonconsensually livestreams Nadia’s naked body to everyone he knows, AND he “addressed the e-mail wrong” so it went out to “every mailbox in the East High directory” INCLUDING BLINK-182 AND A MONKEY.
THE NAME FOR THIS IS CRIME.
Biggs sets up his webcam, and Nadia comes over. Biggs shows Nadia to his bedroom so she can change. Nadia takes off her clothes. She does a little dance. Then she starts going through Biggs’s stuff. She finds his sex magazines. She lies down on his bed to read the sex magazines. She starts masturbating on his bed to the sex magazines! WHO WOULD DO THIS IN SOMEONE ELSE’S HOUSE!? It’s almost as though this character is not remotely a person!
The guys urge Biggs to go back in there and “seduce her.”
“If you ever had a chance with Nadia, this is it.”
“Go over there and ask her if she needs an extra hand.”
He barges into the room and instead of, I don’t know, screaming and crying and apologizing for nudely masturbating in the bedroom of an acquaintance??? What would be a normal response to this absolutely alien situation that has literally never happened without the presence of methamphetamine? Instead of anything like that, Nadia is just naughtily titillated and tells Biggs, “You have seen me, now it’s my turn to see you,” and makes him do a striptease. Yeah, okay. “More, more, you bad boy!” YEAH, OKAY.
Then Biggs jizzes in his pants and the monkey cannot believe it. Blink-182 cannot believe it. Nadia cannot believe it the most. She thought she was going to get some of that lil 9-volt coppertop! Biggs begs for a second chance (reminder: everyone he has ever known is watching this and masturbating) and Nadia is like, “Well, I do like your dirty magazines.” Then she says the word shaved, so he jizzes in his pants again.
THEN NADIA GETS SENT BACK TO THE CZECH REPUBLIC BECAUSE HER HOST FAMILY WATCHED HER NONCONSENSUAL WEBCAM PORNO AND WOMEN MUST ALWAYS BE PUNISHED FOR THEIR OWN EXPLOITATION.3
Biggs is moping around because the whole community, including Mark Hoppus, saw his Mark Hoppus (and let’s just say it wasn’t a Tom DeLonge), when he stumbles upon the one person in school who seems unaware of his no-hands jizz video. It’s Michelle, a flute geek who everyone hates because she is always talking about things that happened at band camp. It’s annoying when people have interests and feel joy! Biggs asks her to the prom.
Mena Suvari visits Chris Klein at his job, and she discovers that not only is he a jazz god, he’s also a working-class hot dog boy. But then Klein realizes that he has a big lacrosse game on the same night as the vocal jazz state championships! An angel torn between two worlds! Suvari says it’s okay, but you know that IT IS NOT OKAY.
Stifler’s prom date cancels on him because she thinks Finch might ask her instead and let her touch his tattooed XL johnson, so for revenge Stifler slips “a little something in his mochaccino.” It’s poop juice! Finch is gonna shit like crazy!!!!!
Stifler steers Finch into the girls’ bathroom, and he’s just about to release his bowels when a bunch of girls come in giggling about how Finch is a bad boy that they just HAVE to lick. Oh no! This is his demo! They won’t want to munch his boy meat anymore once they learn that he is an organism that metabolizes food into energy and waste! Unfortunately, he cannot hold it in anymore and diarrhea just starts rocketing out of his asshole while he screams and screams. The girls shriek and run out of the bathroom, and then when Finch comes out, the whole school is gathered to laugh at him. Now he will never have sex! Girls only fuck guys who hold all their shit inside!
Klein’s heart is just not in the lacrosse game, so he bails and gets to the vocal jazz competition just in time. Mena Suvari can’t believe her eyes!
“You’re missing the game for us?”
“No, I’m missing the game for you.”
(The first one would have been better, but okay.)
Then the choir director gives Chris Klein his solo back, which is absolutely not fair to Albert,4 who’s been working really hard on this solo and actually showed up.
FINALLY, IT’S PROM NIGHT. There’s a prom.
They go to Stifler’s lake house for the after-party. Mena Suvari and Chris Klein sensually undress each other in a gazebo. Michelle loves Biggs’s nasty story about Stifler drinking the jizz, and he starts to wonder if she is in fact nasty. Kevin(?) asks Tara Reid if she wants to do the missionary position, and she says only if he says, “I love you,” so he does, and so they do. Finch is feeling nihilistic so he goes through a door that says “Please Keep Out,” and finds Stifler’s mom in there, bein’ horny.
Stifler’s Mom: I’ve got some scotch?
Finch: Single malt?
Stifler’s Mom: Aged eighteen years, the way I like it.
Out of nowhere, Michelle is like, “Oh, and this one time at band camp, I stuck a flute in my pussy,” and then, “Are we gonna screw soon? Because I’m getting kinda antsy.” It turns out, Michelle is the horniest and nastiest girl of them all! She tells Biggs to wear two condoms so he doesn’t jizz too early (don’t tell kids to wear two condoms!) because it turns out she DID see the webcam video after all, but she LIKED IT.
While they’re having sex, she starts screaming in Biggs’s face: “What’s my name? SAY MY NAME, BITCH!” This would be my ringtone if those existed anymore.
After all that, Tara Reid dumps Kevin(?) because she doesn’t want a long-distance boyfriend in college. Kevin says he wasn’t lying when he said, “I love you,” during missionary, and she’s like, “I know.” OH MY GOD, WHO CARES ABOUT THIS?
Biggs wakes up and Michelle is gone because she is a free, libidinous woman who takes what she wants.
Stifler catches Finch fucking his mom and dies.
Biggs goes home and strips on the webcam for Nadia, who is not mad AT ALL about him broadcasting her tits to the entire school and getting her kicked out of her exchange program. She knows it was all worth it because there is nothing on earth, LITERALLY NOTHING, more important than some mediocre boner.
RATING: 1/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.
1 I confess it! I also like Chris Klein!
2 Hey, when will “mochaccino” die as a joke? Like, I get it, your high school shop teacher needs a way to be vaguely homophobic on Facebook, and drinking anything but the shittiest black coffee in existence is extremely homosexual and Marxist, but for FUCK’S SAKE, coffee snobs are not ordering “half-caf extra-hot no foam triple-pump rooty tooty fresh ’n’ fruity crème brûlée for a day fudgy white extra whip coconut mochaccinos” at Starbucks!!! Are you nuts? I actually live in an effete liberal urban center, and we dicks are drinking single-origin pourover from coffee shops that don’t even believe in milk. If you want a really good “mochaccino,” you gotta go outside the city limits to Red State Real America because they’re using heavy whipping cream, they’re giving you 128 ounces of it, and they’re sticking Almond Joys and Oreos and whole cherry pies and other smaller mochaccinos on top, hail Satan. “Mochaccino” is a self-own, please stop.
3 Kinda seems like Shannon Elizabeth was ALSO sent back to the Czech Republic just for playing this role! Has anyone seen her?????
4 Eric Lively, brother of Blake Lively and, more important, ROBIN LIVELY.