The Babymakers
Comedies about sperm are not my favorite. I mean, I know that sperm is a valuable bodily fluid but it doesn’t strike me as funny and when a character spills half the samples in a sperm bank and then slips around on them like a clown on ice, it doesn’t make me laugh. It makes me think “yuck!” Millions of little soldiers being killed for laughs.
The worst movie ever made about a sperm bank is “Frozen Assets” (1992), which I reviewed with these words: “If I were more of a hero, I would spend the next two weeks breaking into theaters where this movie is playing and leading the audience to safety.” This movie isn’t quite that bad, but then few movies are.
Paul Schneider and Olivia Munn play Tommy and Audrey, who are married and maybe around 30. She feels her clock is ticking, but try though they may (and they do), she can’t get pregnant. A doctor tells her she’s fine; it’s Tommy who has “lazy sperm,” possibly because it hasn’t been doing its pull-ups.
Tommy thinks he knows why this cannot be true. Years ago, when he was trying to raise money to buy an engagement ring for Audrey, he sold many deposits of his own sperm to a local sperm bank, whose experts had no problems with it.
What could have gone wrong since then? Would it have anything to do with Tommy’s unfortunate tendency to get himself kicked in the groin? The movie leaves no doubt on that point; some guys just have bad luck. Personally speaking, I’ve never found kicks to the groin particularly funny although recent research in the genre of the Buddy Movie suggests that must be just me.
So after finding out that the sperm bank won’t allow withdrawals under any circumstances even if you say you’re there to fertilize your wife’s eggs Tommy and his buddies Wade and Zig-Zag (Kevin Heffernan and Nat Faxon) come up with a desperate scheme to break in and steal his old sperm. To assist them in this plan, they employ a member of the “Indian Mafia” (Jay Chandrasekhar, who also directed).
Breaking into the bank, they have their difficulties with the slippery floor but also with Officer Malloy (M.C. Gainey), who has been attracted by their acting as suspiciously as it is likely for guys to act while skulking about at night.
What adds to the overall icky quotient of “The Babymakers” is that Chandrasekhar and his writers, Peter Gaulke and Gerry Swallow, are not content merely to make a standard vulgar ranch fest. No, they also want to melt our hearts by making the marriage between Audrey and Tommy sweet and touching. The movie’s oscillations between crude and sentimental become pathological after a while; it’s like someone stood up at a wedding reception and started telling dirty jokes.
“The Babymakers” is totally clueless about its tone; it has no idea how relentlessly it undercuts itself. By the time we arrive at the obligatory happy ending, which is both perfunctory and automatic, I sort of felt insulted. If Chandrasekhar believes his audience will laugh at his vulgarity well then why does he believe it requires a feel good ending?
Watch The Babymakers For Free On Gomovies.