It's hard to say if a movie was slammed harder in 2005 than Jenny McCarthy's Dirty Love. A low-budget gross-out romantic comedy starring and written by the former Playboy playmate and MTV host that was directed by her then husband John Asher (they've since separated with McCarthy hooking-up with Jim Carrey), Dirty Love saw such an outpouring of negativity it'll be interesting to see if McCarthy manages to rebound from it.

While, I myself, didn't find it to be quite as bad as it could've been, this is still a predictable, forgettable, and (at times) needlessly tasteless effort. McCarthy's script is a poor bagful of clichés and she overacts for the most part (check out the 'XTC' moment for proof of this, as well as the opening scene even), but even she's better than the embarrassing turn by Carmen Electra as a wannabe African-American white girl.

Rebecca (McCarthy) is pretty unlucky in love. She catches her model boyfriend Richard (Victor Webster) in bed with another woman one night after work and finds herself caught in the world of the "single woman" all the while pining for her ex-beau. But her friends (which include Electra's horrible stereotype and American Pie veteran Eddie Kaye Thomas playing a variation on the character from those movies) aren't about to sit back and let her be miserable so they beginning setting her up on all sorts of blind dates and that's were Dirty Love tries to wring most of its humour from. We see Rebecca go out with a guy who likes shoving fish into his hindquarters ("Touch my bass, Rebecca, touch my bass!") as well as a magician type (Guillermo Diaz, who's actually rather amusing and the best thing here) and various other losers.

Will Rebecca get back with her ex? Will she find true love? Do we really care?

Dirty Love is the kind of movie that just feels like it's going nowhere and is just waiting to come to an end. McCarthy seems to be trying too hard as both a lead actress and screenwriter as her script seems to be trying for a goofy tone while packing the movie full of all sorts of off-colour humour (such as a scene where a desperate Rebecca heads to the grocery store to get tampons only to end up menstruating her way down the aisles as various people slip in the blood, and this is right after her character and mother trade farts over the telephone) that doesn't sit too well considering this is supposed to be a "romantic" comedy. But at least you can give her this: she's in nowhere near as horrible as Electra who must have been doing this as a favour as nothing else could explain why anyone in their right mind would take such a narrow-minded role (then again having a second glance at her filmography, perhaps she just sucks at choosing roles).

Feeling like a vanity project first and an actual attempt at a funny movie second, Dirty Love is best left alone unless you're curious to see if it's as bad as its reputation (it's not).

Review based on the unrated version. (Chris Hartley, 1/7/07)

Directed By: John Asher.
Written By: Jenny McCarthy.

Starring: Jenny McCarthy, Eddie Kaye Thomas, Carmen Electra, Kam Heskin.