Virtually every review of 2003’s Boat Trip starts the same way. We get a reminder that Cuba Gooding Jr. actually won an Oscar once for his performance in 1996’s Jerry Maguire. We receive a comment about how far he fell to star in 2002’s Snow Dogs. We then hear that 2003’s Boat Trip makes Dogs look like Lawrence of Arabia.

I always thought the slams on Dogs were somewhat unfair. No, the film wasn’t a classic, but it provided decent family entertainment and doesn’t merit regard as an atrocity. Boat Trip, on the other hand, one could definitely place into the “crimes against humanity” category, as it provides a genuinely distasteful and unfunny flick.

At the start of the flick, we meet Jerry (Gooding). He takes his girlfriend Felicia (Vivica A. Fox) on a hot air balloon ride to propose to her. However, he gets motion sick and pukes on her. To add insult to injury, she tells him she met someone else and dumps him.

The movie jumps ahead six months, and we see that Jerry still feels depressed about his loss. His buddy Nick (Horatio Sanz) insists they go clubbing to meet women. While out, Nick encounters a nerdy friend who landed a babe on a cruise. Nick then decides he and Jerry need to follow suit and hit the high seas.

They head to a travel agency, but not before Nick cheeses off one of its employees. As revenge, an agent books them on a gay cruise, though it takes them forever to figure this out when they get on board. Not surprisingly, they freak out when they make this discovery. In a drunken stupor, Jerry falls into a pool and almost drowns. Sexy Gabriella (Roselyn Sanchez) – the ship’s dance teacher - rescues him but soon disappears. In the meantime, aging stud Lloyd (Roger Moore) makes a play for Nick.

Out of nowhere, a lifeboat full of babes appears. The “Swedish Suntanning Team” gets rescued and the ladies relax onboard this cruise ship. Inga (Victoria Silvstedt) declares that they feel safe since they’re among gay men, so Nick pretends to be homosexual to get them to relax. Unfortunately, their harsh coach Sonya (Lin Shaye) notices his erection and outs him as straight, which ruins his fun. He continues to try to get it on with Inga, but Sonya remains an obstacle. When he accidentally goes down on her, however, the coach becomes obsessed with Nick. This means that while Nick pursues Inga, he must fend off Sonya and Lloyd.

Jerry remains smitten with Gabriella, though, and strives to woo her. However, he finds it tough to locate her. Eventually they meet up, though, and get to know more about each other. She also declares a sense of pleasure that unthreatening gay men surround her, though she relates that if she gets horny, she’s sure she can get one to do her a favor. This then encourages Jerry to act gay to get in her pants, and he bribes Nick to pretend to be his partner.

In the meantime, we discover that Felicia feels unsatisfied with her lover. She rethinks her decision to leave Jerry and tracks him to an island layover for the cruise. While Jerry and Gabriella get to know each other, Felicia arrives to create some conflict and forces our hero to make some choices.

The first bad sign: when we see our Oscar-winning star vomit on camera less than five minutes into the flick. The second bad sign: when our Oscar-winning star says to his dog, “She dumped us, Rocco. I know you don’t care – you can lick your own balls.” That also occurs less than five minutes into the movie. The movie doesn’t improve from there.

If you can’t get enough of cheap gay stereotypes and jokes about cheap joke stereotypes, you’ll adore Boat Trip. However, for anyone whose sense of humor has developed even slightly since the age of 11, it seems unlikely they’ll find much humor in this putrid “comedy”.

Scratch that: I can’t imagine anyone will discover any humor in this dismal flick. The characters are thin and totally uninteresting. Gooding used to be a fine actor, but he seems to have totally lost his skills over the last few years. He plays Jerry in a broad and over the top manner that makes him both grating and unlikable. Sanz takes Nick even farther. Sanz periodically seems amusing on Saturday Night Live, but here he just jumps around spastically and appears to think he’ll make us laugh by sheer volume. He doesn’t.

The women don’t fare any better. Actually, Fox does little wrong in the thankless role as The Wrong Woman, but she doesn’t contribute anything much to the part. Still, she does better than the lifeless Sanchez. While a serious looker, Sanchez seems very stiff and awkward in the role. She gives off the impression that she speaks English as a 12th language, and her line readings usually falter.

At least she looks good. The only moderately enjoyable moments in Boat Trip involve the eye candy. As a heterosexual male, can I really complain about shots of babes who do topless jumping jacks? It’s about as far from politically correct as you can get, but I won’t complain.

Speaking of which, Boat Trip tries to have its urinal cake and eat it too. Though the movie abounds in nasty takes on gay men, it tries to redeem itself toward the end with Lessons Learned and Acceptance Awarded. Whaddya know – gays are people too, with their own thoughts, lives, and emotions! They’re not just swishy losers there so straights can make fun of them! Who knew?

Apparently not the folks behind Boat Trip, since they seem to present this “revelation” like a bolt from above. Too bad the sentiment seems cheap and forced. It doesn’t come across like anyone behind the movie actually believes this; they just insert the PC elements in an attempt to redeem themselves for all the nastiness.

It doesn’t work, but that shouldn’t come as a surprise, for other than some decent nudie shots, nothing in Boat Trip works. A witless collection of erection and semen gags, it makes There’s Something About Mary look like a model of restraint and class. At least the latter includes a few decent laughs, but no similar pleasures occur here. If films get any worse than Boat Trip, I don’t want to be there to see them.

Boat Trip appears in an aspect ratio of approximately 1.77:1 on this single-sided, double-layered DVD; the image has been enhanced for 16X9 televisions. At times the picture looked quite good, but it suffered from too many flaws to earn a grade above average.

Sharpness mostly seemed solid. At times the movie appeared slightly soft and undefined, but those instances didn’t pop up too frequently. The flick usually came across as acceptably distinctive and detailed. Jagged edges and moiré effects caused no concerns, but a fair amount of edge enhancement popped up through much of the movie. This became rather intrusive at times. In addition, print flaws seemed way too prominent for a brand-new film. Specks, grit, nicks and debris popped up sporadically during the flick, but they were much more frequent than I’d expect. It even betrayed a streak and a scratch or two, which seemed extremely unusual for a modern movie.

The cruise ship setting allows for a bright palette, and the DVD usually reproduced those well. Occasionally the hues came across as somewhat too dense, but those concerns were rare. Mostly the colors looked lively and vibrant. Black levels were dense and deep, and shadow detail generally seemed solid. A few low-light scenes appeared slightly murky, but those issues stayed minor. Again, Boat Trip usually came across as attractive, but the mix of unnecessary flaws knocked down my grade to a “C”.

The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack of Boat Trip also seemed acceptable but generally unimpressive. The soundfield stayed heavily focused toward the front speakers. Elements seemed placed accurately and blended fairly well. Music offered good stereo imaging and effects moved neatly across the channels. The surrounds didn’t add much to the package, though they occasionally presented some unique audio. A scene with a helicopter panned well from front to rear, and scenes with crowds also added a good sense of ambience. However, the movie didn’t make very active use of the rear channels.

Audio quality seemed fine. Speech was natural and distinct, and I noticed no issues connected to intelligibility or edginess. Effects played a small role, but they were accurate and lacked any distortion. They presented reasonably depth and dynamics. Music also was clean and fairly bold. The songs and score showed clear highs and reasonably firm bass response. As a whole, the soundtrack of Boat Trip seemed satisfactory for this kind of flick, but it didn’t do anything more than that.

A mix of extras rounds out the Boat Trip DVD. The movie itself comes in an unrated version with an additional three minutes reinstated into the flick. Since I never saw the movie before I got the DVD, I can’t speculate about the content of these bits, but I wanted to note they’re there.

The disc includes no audio commentary, but it does present a trivia track. This gives us information about the crew and cast members – both the main actors and some bit players – as well as related issues like cruises, stalkers, the songs in the flick, and other topics. The notes pop up somewhat infrequently and don’t add a lot to the package. It’s pretty ballsy of them to flash “Show me the Oscar” repeatedly and mockingly during a heartfelt Gooding monolog toward the end of the flick, though.

More unusual and potentially more interesting, the set offers “live, groundbreaking” interactive menus. What makes these, um, stimulating, is the presence of many Playboy Playmates who sunbathe topless. I suppose the PC thing would be for me to criticize this as a shameless and sleazy attempt to sell DVDs. That’s exactly what it is, but the day I knock the presence of beautiful topless women is the day I die. The menus offer the best part of this DVD despite the models’ insanely inane banter.

For more fun with the Playmates, we head to the Tanning Tips featurette. The five-minute and 33-second program shows the women as they give us advice about safe tanning. They keep on their clothes until the end and their statements are pretty lame, so this one’s skippable except for maybe the last minute.

Up next we find a 14-minute and 56-second Making Of Boat Trip program. It presents the standard mix of movie clips, shots from the set, and soundbites. We get remarks from director Mort Nathan plus actors Cuba Gooding Jr., Vivica A. Fox, Horatio Sanz, Roselyn Sanchez, and Roger Moore. The vast majority of the featurette just shows film snippets, and the comments simply rehash the story and tell us how funny it is. It’s a poor program.

After this we get a collection of deleted scenes. The DVD includes five excised segments that run between 34 seconds and 127 seconds for a total of six minutes, 27 seconds of footage. Considering how bad the final flick is, do you really expect to find any buried treasure here? You won’t.

Nor does anything interesting appear in the series of seven Outtakes. These goofs and wacky bits run between seven seconds and 68 seconds for a total of 150 seconds of footage. To add insult to injury, we don’t get a “Play All” option here or elsewhere. That’s not so annoying for the deleted scenes since they’re mostly longer, but given the extreme brevity of most of the outtakes, it’s a serious nuisance to navigate them this way.

Some ads appear in the Sneak Peeks domain. Here we get trailers for Terminator 2, The Punisher, Havana Nights, Guilty By Association, Loco Love and The Fourth Angel.

A number of Easter eggs appear. From the main menu, click to the right from “Extras”. This highlights a hand on the flick’s title; hit enter to find a 13-second welcome to the DVD from the models. On the “Set Up” menu, go to the left from “Main”. This highlights a hand on a banana; press enter to get possibly the lamest extra ever via a rap song about the movie and the DVD.

Another egg shows up on the “Set Up” menu. Press “right” from “Subtitles” highlight a hand on a life preserver. Select enter and watch one of the models wear Groucho glasses and use a banana as a cigar. We then see outtakes from the main menu sessions. One oddity: apparently Shauna Sand’s top slips a little and reveals a nipple. The clip places a big “Censored” bar over her chest. I assume this was because Sand didn’t want to show any skin, which seems really odd since she was a Playmate and exposed a lot more than one nipple there.

Finally, highlight “Credits” on the “Extras” menu and click to the right. This puts the hand over some stars. When you hit enter we get more outtakes from the menu session.

I might’ve seen a less funny and more repellent movie than Boat Trip, but I can’t think of any candidates right now. The film presents an absurdly crude and crass experience that never threatens to amuse. The DVD features mediocre picture with decent sound and some generally lame extras rescued simply by some nudity. As much I like topless women, even naked Playmates can’t redeem this atrocity.