American Pie Presents: The Book of Love (2009)

American Pie Presents: The Book of Love arrives as the fourth direct-to-video installment in a spin-off series that has, by this point, settled into a comfortable rhythm of peanut butter, ski lifts, and regret. Three high school virgins discover a water-damaged sex manual in the East Great Falls library and set about following its forty-year-old instructions. The results include a deceased prostitute, a moose, and a quantity of footage uploaded to the internet without anyone's consent. This is a film with no agenda beyond the pursuit of the next crude sight gag, and it pursues that gag with a persistence that borders on the admirable.

On the matter of representation, the cast is a uniformly white suburban assemblage, with Sherman Hemsley appearing briefly in what would prove his final screen role. The film does not comment on this. It does not comment on much. Women exist here as targets, prizes, and punchlines, regarded by the camera with the fixed attention of a teenage boy who has just discovered the concept. No feminist reading is available, and no racial consciousness either, and no environmental concern, unless we count the sprinkler system. A running joke about a character's fondness for women's underwear is offered purely as humiliation, not as any species of identity. The economics of the enterprise go unexamined, which is fitting, since the enterprise is itself a product engineered to move units.

To be fair to the thing, it never pretends otherwise. There is no sermon here, no lesson, no pause to instruct the audience on how to live. In 2009, the raunchy teen comedy had not yet been asked to carry the weight of anyone's politics, and this one carries nothing at all. It is a relic of a less self-conscious period, and it should be catalogued as such.