Cattle Call (2006)

It's hard to see any effort in the film. There's no comedy to speak of, no real drama and, worst of all.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

You're thinking, "National Lampoon"? It must be funny! No. It's not funny. No laughs, no chuckles, certainly no guffaws. It's not even mildly interesting.Three deadbeats set up a fake casting agency. Using no money. Huh? They rent a studio-like office and convince hundreds of desperate women that their stupid questions about sex and men have some connection to a movie audition.They get caught out, are sodomised by some butch lesbians with electrical implements, charged with fraud, go to trial, then, in one night, magically pull together some bits and pieces of video-tape, sufficient to convince a judge it was for real all along.Oh, and the main deadbeat gets the beautiful girl anyway.Dross. Don't waste your time. No, even the lesbians-with-the-electrical-implements bit was mercifully brief and dull. Really. Okay, some of the other stuff was even more dull, but this was dull, too. [ 2/10 ]

I gave this movie one bonus point for a total rating of 5 out of 10, for the insight it offered about the inner workings of Hollywood, which had puzzled me after seeing KNOWING the previous day. It turns out that all you have to do to make a flick is cobble together some ideas from other people's scripts (the English caption function built into most DVD's can carry even the most illiterate crew member through the dialog portion of this step), and then tell anyone who shows up for the casting call (or "cattle call," here) just to do what they feel comfortable with (it obviously worked for director Alex Proyas and star Nicolas Cage in KNOWING, to the tune of this week's number one box office hit). So thanks, National Lampoon, now all is illuminated.

It ain't no Vacation movie but I guess I could say it was worth the rental..sorta. I had small mixed feelings about this movie. The premise of the movie was good, it was just the movie itself that was bad. Diedrich Bader had a very weak performance in this movie and Thomas Ian Nicholas showed me why again I never really found anything special about him. Although there were a few times where I laughed, the romantic parts felt like I was watching a bad TV-movie. If I were you, I would approach this movie with caution, you'll like it if you're a die-hard National Lampoon fan. You'll be disappointed if you're expecting a Dorm Daze movie. I just hope that there is no sequel in the works.

A very funny comedy that will appeal to most adults, I thought Diedrich Bader, Thomas Ian Nicholas and Johnathen Winters stood out in the movie with their very keen senses of humor. Paul Mazursky played the perfect overbearing hapless judge, overall just a great supporting cast, a lot of laughs from beginning to end! The storyline is completely believable in that a desperate guy played by Thomas Ian Nicholas aided by his good buddies that he also convinces to assist him and themselves,{they don't need to much convincing mind you} to cook up a scheme to "meet as many women/girls as possible, by putting advertisements in the paper and creating a fake casting call for a movie that really doesn't exist! A person definitely gets the sense that this cooked up idea may have been attempted in the past by " guys looking to meet and date as many women as they can". Ask any producer or director and they will tell you that casting calls routinely can draw literally hundreds if not thousands of people that want to audition for parts.I have seen most of the National Lampoons and this rates up there for believability,acting skills, realism and humor. At the premiere I happened to sit next to a very well known "movie critic" and for what it's worth he gave it "two thumbs up"!!! "A MUST SEE SLEEPER COMEDY THAT WILL BE COMING OUT IN THE THEATRES IN THE FIRST QUARTER OF 07 !!!!!!!!!!!!!1