Justin’s rating: This is *technically* a ’90s movie as it was filmed in 1998 but not released until 2000.

Justin’s review: It’s come to my attention that we here at Mutant Reviewers are just being way too positive toward movies. The other day, my fictional mailman threw my Entertainment Weekly in a puddle and barked, “Why don’t you cover more movies you hate? You just love all this filmed refuse, but you don’t seem to have a mean bone in your Italian body!”

He had a good point. As a hot-blooded man, I had to prove him wrong. Step one was tying him to a tree, covering him with honey, and letting the ants devour his carcass. Step two was to purge my soul of glee with one of the worst piles of rancid baby diaper flicks that I had seen in recent memory.

That movie was Whipped. I am Justin, Head Mutant.

This film accomplishes a very specific purpose: namely, it makes you deeply ashamed to be a member of either major gender. I went into the theater hoping to see a sassy and quirky foray about dating, and I came out trying to avoid eye contact with my fellow movie patrons while deeply wishing I could get a refund.

So how did Whipped soil the fertile plains of my masculinity? Simple, it hates everyone.

Our movie opens with our four so-called protagonists who are all best buddies that hang out on Sunday afternoons at a local diner to discuss their “dating” lives. There’s Brad, an arrogant jock. There’s Eric, a whiney married spud living vicariously through his friends’ lives. There’s Jonathan, a chronic dork whose major sin is that he only has sex with (gasp) women he cares about. And there’s Zeke, a model for a coffeshop beatnik smug jerk.

Right off the bat, these four idiots ramble on proudly about their various scamming techniques (“scamming” defined as “lying as to get a woman to sleep with you”). The major unsaid assumption is that we in the audience share this desire to have sex predicated on lies instead of founding meaningful relationships.

And I don’t exactly know how to specify where the line between foul language to be funny and extreme language to be utterly repulsive lies, but Whipped settles firmly into the latter category. I mean, seriously, I felt HORRIBLE the couple times I laughed because the things they were saying were so totally repugnant.

Commercials would have you believe that Mia (Amanda Peet) is the star of this vehicle and in it pretty much constantly, but she really only has a supporting role. She shows up “coincidentally” (yes, I hate to use quote marks in this fashion, but somehow it fits the film) to each of the three single guys and dates them all simultaneously.

In the hands of a lesser filmmaker, this might have the plot twists that you’ve seen in many many sitcoms to date. Not so for director X, who sucks any joy out of this faster than a Florida mosquito on my eyeball. Just as soon as a scene threatens to be funny, it takes a U-turn and becomes a lame commentary on dating, or a pathetic try at humanity, or jams us up to our armpit in an overflowing toilet. Literally.

THIS NEXT PART IS A SPOILER. FOR THE END OF THE FILM. I’M SERIOUSLY HOPING YOU’LL NEVER WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE SO THAT YOU CAN ENJOY MY WITTY DECONSTRUCTION CONTAINED IN THIS PARAGRAPH. THAT IS ALL.

As if you couldn’t see it coming, the big twist — steel yourself — is that Mia has been scamming the guys just as bad as they had scammed other women! Wow! The woman is worse than the guys, if that were possible! That makes it so nobody is an honorable character and everyone is two periodic elements below slime! The moral, what I could deduce, is that people are little more than erotic scoreboard points. I don’t talk like this. Do you talk like this?

Now, if Whipped were a satire of the comedic sort, it might have worked. But the filmmakers, the characters, the dialogue, the plot… it’s plain cruel and demeaning toward everyone. Whipped clocks in at a mere 82 minutes, but it felt like the entire run of Married With Children… without the laughs.