“You know when you hear girls say 'Ah man, I was so shit-faced last night, I shouldn't have fucked that guy?' We could be that mistake!” says Seth, enthusiastically motivating his best friend Evan. There’s a noble lineage of gross-out teen-movies through Porky’s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High to American Pie and Superbad. The formula is a simple and relatively unchanged – high school boys desperate for booze and sex have one party left in which they can get both. Succeed  and they climb the social ladder. Fail and they retain their nerdy status well into college, if not for the rest of their lives. Naturally, they’re desperate and desperation yields complication which yields poor behaviour and foul language. Ones taste for the latter governs ones tolerance for the former.

Although Superbad doesn’t exactly revitalise the genre, it does give it a fresh coat in two significant areas. Scriptwriters Seth Rogan and Evan Goldberg give their likeable characters a sense of realism. For better or worse, and some of their behaviour is quite deplorable, these are people we’ve all met, if not been or tried to avoid. Penned when the writers were fresh from school, Superbad benefits from a heart not often found in gross-out comedy. In fact a scene in which the straight leads pledge their love is rather touching. OK, they’re drunk and do their best to forget it the next morning, but for a fleeting moment two men come clean.

Secondly, much of Superbad is funny of the laugh-out-loud, I-can’t-believe-he-just-said-that, did-the-drunk-policeman-really-try-to-shoot-a-teenager? variety. While the film turns on the failing relationship between Seth and Evan, it spins on an out-of-control subplot involving the fake-ID wielding McLovin and two cops who befriend him. Although Superbad runs out of steam before crossing the finish line, most of it is highly entertaining and nothing that would trouble sixteen year old boys who took it to Number One. For as Evan wisely notes, “She wants to suck on your penis. That’s a good thing. It’s the best.”

// COLIN FRASER