I was buzzing through today's Studio Briefing where editor Lew Irwin compiles several reviews into a fast paragraph, the review of "Whipped" caught my eye:
"New York Daily News critic Jami Bernard doesn't often rate films with zero stars, but that's what she gives Whipped. Her review concludes with these words: "The ways in which broken men and women scam each other to make themselves feel better takes a backseat to that other burning question: Who scammed whom to get this movie made?" Andy Seiler in USA Today is no less damning in his review, calling the film "loathsome from the get-go" and adding that it tells a "toilet-paper-thin" tale." Similarly Loren King in the Boston Globe comments that Whipped "takes toilet humor to new depths."Stephen Holden in the New York Times puts it this way: "There are moments when this dirty-mouthed revenge comedy becomes so mean-spirited that you almost gasp at its cruelty."
Rather Cruel wouldn't you say? Whipped's director must have for seen this coming because he was already all over the place with excuses:
...after it was initially handed an NC-17 rating by the MPAA ratings board. "They don't tell you what to take out," first-time filmmaker Peter M. Cohen told today's Los Angeles Daily News. "You have to just keep on resubmitting, and I think I resubmitted about eight times." The newspaper reported that Cohen deleted "a ton" of questionable dialogue. "They didn't ask me to remove these things, but these are the things that got it down to an R," he told the newspaper. Cohen acknowledged that removing the dialogue from the film was upsetting. "Definitely, it still has an edge," Cohen remarked. "But it used to have a bigger edge."