The resurgence of the teen sex comedy had well and truly ended by 2014 after Judd Apatow and the gang’s moment in the sun had passed, but nobody bothered to tell the team behind the abominable Behaving Badly, which might just be the decade’s worst contribution to the genre.
It’s got a hell of a cast, though, which makes things even more bizarre. Rising star Nat Wolff plays a rambunctious teenager with a longtime crush on Selena Gomez’s character, before he somehow ends up placing a bet with the son of a local mobster that he’ll have sex with her before the upcoming Arbor Day.
From there, he ends up sleeping with his best friend’s mom – played by Academy Award and Golden Globe-nominated Elisabeth Shue – encounters two-time Golden Globe winner Mary-Louise Parker’s Saint Lola, and runs amok amongst an ensemble that also includes Heather Graham, Jason Lee, Dylan McDermott, Cary Elwes, and Patrick Warburton.
In spite of all that talent, Behaving Badly has never managed to climb off a zero percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which is entirely justified. Upwards of 2500 user ratings haven’t elevated it any higher than 29 percent, either, but its status as a raunchy romp ensured that streaming success was inevitable.
As you can imagine, then, Behaving Badly‘s addition to Paramount Plus has seen it appear out of nowhere to become one of the platform’s most popular hits, even though it’s a borderline crime against cinema that stands out as a low point among the filmographies of virtually everybody involved.