It seems nearly impossible for a movie to get a 0 percent on Rotten Tomatoes. To start with, there are 100 better numbers to choose from, which is not a small amount. Second, the internet can almost always turn up some schmo with a dissenting opinion either to bump a 0 percent up to a one or knock a 100 percent down to a 99. Third, so few movies are terrible enough to deserve the lowest score possible. But this is life, and terrible movies do exist, and Behaving Badly is one of them. A teen raunch-comedy starring Nat Wolff (the blind best friend from this summer’s The Fault in Our Stars) as a disaffected high-schooler who just wants to get with his virginal classmate (played by Selena Gomez), Behaving Badly is a cross between Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, American Pie, Risky Business, the MILF channel on YouPorn, and a bucket of vomit.
It also features Justin Bieber in a brief cameo, in which he floats by the camera dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. He says nothing and is never referred to nor seen again. It’s the movie’s most mysterious and interesting moment. Was there more Bieber footage that got cut, or did he show up on set for literally three seconds? Why does he look so sad? Is he a ghost? Is he a sad ghost? Is he La Llorona?
There are 90 other minutes surrounding those three seconds, and while none are as enigmatic, many of those minutes are even more bizarre and ridiculous and terrible. This is what it was like to watch Selena Gomez’s 0 percent movie:
• Despite her being featured front and center on the movie poster, this is not Selena Gomez’s movie. It it Nat Wolff’s. He is the one who narrates the film, talking to the screen with a deadpan ironic detachment à la Ferris Bueller. His character’s name is Rick Stevens, and it’s easy to believe that writer-director Tim Garrick woke up one morning, glanced at the Rick Steve’s guidebook to Costa Rica on his coffee table, and just went from there.
• Poor Heather Graham can’t even get her name on the poster, which nonetheless does make room to mention that the movie is from the producer of 10 Things I Hate About You, a 15-year-old movie that it shares very little with. But I can understand why you’d rather say that instead of, “From the Producer of Death to Smoochy†or “From the Producer of Jonah Hex†or “From the Producer of Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore.â€
• Selena Gomez is definitely in this movie, though, and she plays a boring, manager-approved good girl. She is a straight-A student. She’s good at Latin. She likes Josh Groban. She says the line, “After Meals on Wheels, I’m gonna go down to the shelter and play with orphaned animals.†She stands in stark contrast to almost every other woman in the movie, each of which is hypersexualized. Behaving Badly is like an accidental thesis film about the Virgin/Whore divide in pop culture.
• Poor Elisabeth Shue. Poor, poor Elisabeth Shue. I know – everyone makes their choices in life. But this is an irredeemable role. It’s unclear whether or not she’s meant to be on drugs in this movie. (Aside from the ecstasy that she takes at one point.) Her character arc involves having to have sex with Rick Stevens — her son’s 16-year-old best friend — from moment one. At one point, she literally chases him around a room because she wants to have sex with him. Why? Is she a pedophile? Did a stray bullet enter and exit her brain without her knowledge? The most likely reason is that guys who write bad movies wanted to have sex with their best friends’ mothers when they were teenagers.
• Mary-Louise Parker plays Rick Stevens’s mother. She is also the best friend of Shue’s character. So Shue’s character is having sex with her son’s best friend, who also happens to be her best friend’s son. SYMMETRY. Parker’s character is an alcoholic who attempts suicide in the opening minutes. Rick Stevens responds to this by telling a police officer, “My mother’s deep-throating a breathing tube and you want to know how far she got in college?†HUMOR.
• Parker also plays a saint whom Rick Stevens hallucinates. That she looks exactly like his mother is acknowledged. That she wears the following outfits never really is:
• But the fact that she plays a saint is just part of the odd Christian subtext to this film. Gomez’s character comes from a conservative religious family and she wants to be a female priest. Jason Lee plays a non-female priest who is also having sex with Shue’s character and is in cahoots with organized crime. At one point, a group of nuns emerges from the back of a van in slow-motion while gangsta rap plays on the soundtrack. And let’s not forget the image of he who suffers for our sins, the Holy Beeb:
Actual line of dialogue from Behaving Badly
“You’re the dirty little fucker that gave me crabs. You’re excommunicated. Ex-fucking-communicated!â€
• Dylan McDermott plays a mustachioed strip-club owner. There is one scene where he washes a dildo with the same sponge he uses to wash his dirty dishes. I can’t be the only one offended by this.
• McDermott’s character says the following things, one after the other: “I need Britney Spears to lick my ballsâ€; “Well I need J.Lo to stick her finger up my assâ€; “I need my poop chute bleached.â€
• Cary Elwes play’s Rick Stevens’s father. At one point, Rick Stevens, Selena Gomez, and the requisite dumb best friend end up at a motel selling ecstasy to Dylan McDermott (who is holed up in a room with a sheep, heard offscreen). There they run into Elwes’s character, who is dressed thusly:
Actual line of dialogue from Behaving Badly
“I saw this documentary. Or maybe it was a movie. It was called Rent, and everybody had AIDS.â€
• At one point, a small person gets thrown into the air after being shocked by an electric wire.
• At one point, a character climaxes into the human-sexuality textbook he has been masturbating to while sitting in front of a large poster that says “Beat it.â€
• At one point, Gary Busey shows up for a hot minute, and he has such trouble speaking that I believed he was going to die mid-scene.
• At one point, Elisabeth Shue masturbates with an electric whisker.
Actual line of dialogue from Behaving Badly
“Sometimes you look at your life and say, ‘I’m doing the best that I can.’ Other times you have to look at your life and say, ‘I just fucked my best friend’s mom.’â€
• Never forget.