The nice boy next door is up to some fruity shenanagins. Fruit pie, that is.
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Four libidinous teenage boys out to lose their virginity. Not exactly Merchant Ivory material, but let's face it--bad taste is in. The film American Pie proudly carries on the tradition of gross-out comedy that struck a juvenile chord with audiences in There's Something About Mary.
In fact, the very same substance that gave Cameron Diaz's bangs a lift in Mary finds its way into a cup of beer in this film. Jason Biggs, who makes his film debut playing the most inexperienced of the inexperienced boys, is getting a lot of prerelease attention for his part in American Pie, and he thinks he knows why. "If I had to say there were five crazy, 'Oh-my-God-I-can't-believe-I-saw-that' scenes, my character is directly involved in three of them," he humbly submits. Like, for instance, a masturbation scenario with a sock, and another with a warm apple pie. And that's not even mentioning his striptease that ends up being broadcast all over the . . . well, we won't spoil it for you.
Did Biggs ever take part in any similar activities in real life? "I wasn't exactly humping baked goods my senior year," he offers. But he wasn't exactly reading Nietzsche 24 hours a day either. "A teenager's life is not PG-13," he declares.
Biggs, who could pass for Adam Sandler's more animated younger brother, has been acting on television and stage since he was five and claims to know exactly why audiences are responding to this raucous brand of humor: it hits home and, even if the situations border on sleazy, there's a certain sweetness to the shenanigans. "Beneath it all," he says, "it's very real, and beneath it all, the movie's got a lot of heart."
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Gary Socol