Susan Granger’s review of “The Real Cancun” (New Line Cinema)
So where did you spend your Spring Break? Was it as wild and raunchy as this Mexican resort where 16 young people frolicked for eight days, partying almost 24 hours a day? I doubt it. Producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray (TV’s “The Real World”) and director Rick De Oliviera selected eight women and eight men from supposedly 10,000 exhibitionistic candidates, auditioned on college campuses across the United States, to live in a resort hotel under the scrutiny of cameras and microphones for 24 hours a day. Uninhibited and uncensored, they cavort in their rooms and at beachfront clubs and concerts, indulging every whim to dine, drink and debauch themselves. There’s no real storyline because there was no script. It’s reality film-making, or as Pirandello put once it: characters in search of an author. There’s Jeremy, the blond macho stud from Arizona, who brags, “Girls go on spring break to meet guys like me,” and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, shy, virginal Alan from Texas Tech, who learns how to drink tequila and whines, “I just wanna see some boobies.” That kind of crass excitement is amply provided by Roxanne and Nicole, identical twins from Albuquerque, New Mexico, who put on quite a naughty show with and without wet T-shirts. Plus, there’s fresh-faced and innocent Heidi and David, 18 year-old best-friends from Massachusetts who have often flirted with each other but never hooked up. And Casey’s the oldest; at 25, he’s an aspiring model from Miami who’s never held a steady job. For him, life is one long Spring Break. On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Real Cancun” is a stripped-down, sleazy 4. Rated R, it’s every horny adolescent’s rite-of-passage fantasy and every parent’s nightmare.
