Win a Trip to Browntown (2022)
My dear reader, I come before you with a confession. I watched comedy Win a Trip to Browntown! . . . but I never finished it. I couldn’t. Life is short. I’ve got things to do. I stopped at about a buck-five with still 28 minutes left on the running time but there was a point at which I could take no more. I have never attempted to write about a movie that I hadn’t never seen all the way to the end, but let’s face it, ninety-three minutes is asking too much from a movie that persists in a dopey comedy focused on anal sex.
Yes, this is a comedy by and large. I feel the need to illustrate this because, for a lowly film critic, laugh-free comedies are Hell on Earth. In the case of this movie, I think the Geneva Convention should get involved.
To my surprise, what sinks Win a Trip to Browntown! is not the plot but the execution. I am a firm believer that nearly anything can be made funny, but when the approach goes wrong, so too do any attempts to bring about a laugh. For this movie, it is the actors.
The acting style is startlingly . . . off. The performances (from unknown actors) feel like bad sketch comedy performed by people who have never been in front of an audience before. The dialogue all sounds like it is being read for a local commercial. This is deadly to a comedy. Much of the dialogue in the first 20 minutes is made up of those movie conversations which double as exposition:
Guy #1: “Sometimes, I can’t believe that you’re my manager”
Guy #2: “Well, I’m young and I don’t care about money or advancement, which according to the state makes me the ideal University employee.”
Guy #1: “Then why am I here?”
Guy #2: “Well, you’re a writer with a family. You need the benefits and you aren’t qualified to do much else.”
That’s bad enough, but then there’s the plot, which centers on a struggling writer named Frank (writer-director George Tramountanas) whose wife Laura (Kendra McDermott) bets him that if he can lose 50 pounds in three months, she will offer him anal sex. That’s a dirty joke, not a movie. What’s worse is that in a movie with this premise, things eventually come down to a homespun message about the importance of family bonding. That’s after Laura publicly humiliates herself by masturbating in a car in front of her kid’s school!
But that’s not what tossed me out of the movie. Toward the end, Frank is involved in a pitch contest where aspiring writers get to submit their ideas. The contestants are seen in montage, one of which is a severely depressed young girl who offers her book “S is for Suicide,” a pop-up book about methods of killing one’s self including the proper way to cut your wrists – this is played for laughs! I’m going to stop there because that’s what stopped me from watching this horror show.
About the Author: Jerry Roberts
Jerry Roberts is a film critic and operator of two websites, Armchair Cinema and Armchair Oscars. 
