LOVE POTION #9

REVIEWED BY CHARITY BISHOP

Our rating: 2 out of 5

Because of: sexual content, language, thematic elements

Rated:

I used to love the song by the same title, about the young man who went to a gypsy and received a love potion, then drank it and went about kissing random people on the street, before the bottle of potion was broken by an infuriated policeman. When the song began to play through the introduction credits, I had a feeling this movie was going to amuse me. It did.

Paul Matthews (Tate Donovan) has no success with women. Every time he tries to impress one, he strikes out. A geeky biochemist with no social skills and overly ambitious friends, his attempts to even talk to the beautiful girls he meets at the bar are thwarted by his own inadequacies. Having visited a gypsy fortune teller with his friends, the old crone gives him a potion that she promises will make any woman fascinated with what he has to say. Tossing the smudge of scarlet potion into the trash can, Paul doesn't believe it's true until his cat accidentally gets into it. One meow has the household crawling with strays. Excited about the potential for such a drug, Paul takes it to his equally-socially-challenged partner Dianne Farrow (Sandra Bullock) and has her test-try it out on her monkeys. The drug drives them ballistic. 

Deciding it's time to give it a real test drive, the two split up the rest of the potion in a convenient mouth-spray and agree not to speak for two weeks. Paul heads back to the bar to humiliate the gorgeous blonde that turned him down the first time around. Dianne, quite by accident, lands herself a charming prince. Literally. The potion works so miraculously that the two of them are able to get everything they ever wanted, but in the hours they're not manipulating the eardrums of the opposite sex, the two of them are discovering that true love can be found right in the lab. Dianne and Paul seem destined for an everlasting love, when a former man in her life swoops in and carries her away. Paul is left confused, upset, and frustrated, but determined to get to the bottom of it and win back Dianne's heart.

One word to sum up this film in its entirety would be "quirky." It doesn't try to be believable and isn't, but the audience is having too much fun to care. It follows a non-predictable format (for the most part) and throws in some moments intended for nothing more than hilarity. Imagine what might happen if you could charm everyone you know into doing whatever you asked them to. One of the more amusing moments has a young woman being chased by all the men in the city. When finally cornered, she has them hop around on one foot and touch their finger to their nose. What was the most fun for me was seeing Sandra Bullock go from being "ugly" to "beautiful." She starts out as a gap-toothed geek with bad hair and thick glasses, and winds up the jaw-dropping lady we know and love. I liked her more than Paul, who simply didn't appeal to me for various reasons.

It's unfortunate that the film has a decent amount of sexual content, because otherwise it would be quite cute. Dianne has an on-and-off boyfriend that drops in for sex whenever he's feeling lonely. We see the very end of their latest tryst, before he gets out of bed and goes home. Paul has a woman graphically come on to him in the bar; she straddles his lap, kisses him passionately, and starts to unbuckle his pants. Once getting the hang of the love potion, he loads up on condoms and heads into a female college dorm. He and Dianne share a sexual relationship (implied through numerous afterglow sequences). In an apology for humiliating Paul in front of several women, a friend sends a hooker up to his apartment. She winds up spending an hour in his bathroom brushing her teeth, combing her hair, and ignoring him. After giving the monkeys the medication, one of the male chimps corners the female and humps the cage. There are a dozen profanities and several abuses of Jesus' name, along with some slapstick violence.

The gypsy woman that sells him the potion is a palm reader. The emphasis on her is more of sarcasm than any true liaison with the occult. I would have found it more charming if it wasn't so sexually focused, because the premise was quite cute and it did have numerous memorable moments.