Genre: comedy, romance

The Girl Next Door

Directed by Luke Greenfield

Written by Stuart Blumberg,

David T. Wagner and Brent Goldberg

Starring Emile Hirsch

and Elisha Cuthbert

Classification: 14A

Rating: **½

The mainstream prominence of pornography gets a shove forward with the teen comedy, The Girl Next Door, an improbably-not-terrible teen sex comedy.

The story of a high-school high achiever whose college chances are thrown into jeopardy when he falls for an adult film star may be risqué, but it's far from fresh. The title is the same as the 1999 documentary on housewife turned porn star, Stacy Valentine. Much of the rest of the film -- from the overall plot, to the ambient music (Tangerine Dream did the Risky Business score; former Dream keyboardist Paul Haslinger does the job here) and even specific scenes and characters -- is a slavish update on Paul Brickman's stylish 1983 comedy, Risky Business.

That was the film that featured Rebecca De Mornay as the ice-cool teenaged hooker, and Tom Cruise's career-making scene, dancing to Bob Seger in his underwear. The Girl Next Door may be more off-colour, but otherwise it plays things a lot safer than Risky Business, with the comedy pitched just a little above the American Pie slapstick level, but with a similar emphasis on public embarrassments. Emile Hirsch (The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys) stars as Matthew, an earnest student-council president, working hard at scoring a scholarship to Georgetown University and trying to keep his hormonal urges in check. When a lissome young woman, Danielle (Canadian actress Elisha Cuthbert), moves in next door and undresses in slow motion at her window, Matthew is smitten. When she catches him peeking, she initiates a chaste but budding romance. The besotted Matthew only later learns from one of his porn-wise friends, Eli, that he has fallen for a erotic film star.

The movie is often more erratic than erotic, shifting in tone from broad comedy to dreamy fantasy, while the chemistry between the two leads remains well below ignition point. Hirsch is sweet but sexless, while Cuthbert (from the TV series 24) seems less a person than a calculated mixture of lips-parted vulnerability and purring soft-core-porn fantasy. The character is so sketchily drawn she remains without such basics as a family background or any notable motivations for either getting into, or wanting out of the pornography business.

Much better defined are the supporting roles. Matthew's two nerd buddies -- the grating careerist filmmaker Eli (Chris Marquette) and the head-in-the-clouds, improbably named Klitz (Paul Dano) -- are both fun. The movie receives a needed energy jolt with the arrival of Danielle's producer Kelly (the scene-stealing Timothy Olyphant) as a cartoonishly menacing grease-ball who takes his star back to Los Vegas and leaves Matthew with a big financial problem.

The movie's denouement -- involving a seedy porn kingpin, a trip to an adult-film convention and another twist on the Risky Business climax -- is seriously overextended but, at least, the writing team seems to have been trying. At this stage in Hollywood history, any teen movie that doesn't involve flying body fluids deserves some kind of commendation.