You think this movie would offer plenty of opportunities to lure in pervs with a prurient screen capture, but no. Here’s an upside-down (lesbian) Eva Longoria.

Despite doing minimal research on the films we cover, I like to think that I have a pretty good idea of what kind of movie I select each week. Without Men originally escaped my reach due to seeming in all ways like a pretty generic romantic comedy, despite the prominent placement of Christian Slater on the cover. When I read that it was based on an acclaimed novel about a South American village faced with a sudden lack of men after the male populace is recruited by a guerilla army, however, my interest was piqued. How do you take this NPR-friendly premise and turn into a straight to DVD romantic comedy?

The answer is baffling. Pitched somewhere between an episode of I Love Lucy, a Pedro Almodovar film and an entry in the National Lampoon series, Without Men is one of the least funny, corniest and most inexplicable film to ever be featured on Why Does It Exist? Lesbian subplots, group masturbation scenes, musical sequences, Oscar from The Office as a randy town priest and a harried Slater barely factoring into plot crash into an grey, mushy sludge from which no one escapes unscathed, least of all me and  this week’s guest,  onetime DVD thief Lizel Chavez. I made a movie with Lizel in it years ago but it seems to have disappeared off YouTube, so I guess you can just imagine what that looks like.

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Music this week by Cobra & Vulture  – their song Early Adopter can be found on the Vocare EP, available here. They will be performing as part of Pop Montreal (schedule available here soon) as well as Phog Phest in Windsor this September.