Bridesmaids

2011 R

Bridesmaids poster

I’ve seen divorce trials that painted a rosier portrait of marriage, episodes of “Jersey Shore” with more humanity and case files on “Hoarders” that were less filthy than “Bridesmaids.”

It starts with a woman, Annie, squirming as she endures obviously boring and over-vigorous sex, then being asked, like a whore, to leave at dawn. Our bony heroine, played by Kristin Wiig, proceeds to a

soul-sucking jewelry sales job — she lost her cute little cupcake shop in the recession — where she tells her customers, with less enthusiasm than a candidate for euthanasia, to tone down their expectations for

happiness. She comes home to a fat idiot of a roommate who accepts free tattoos and pours frozen peas on them to ease the pain and a mother whose joy in life comes from exposing her fellow Alcoholics

Anonymous members. To top it off, her childhood best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) is doing fabulously and getting married — an experience that will introduce Annie to all Lillian’s atrocious, well-heeled new pals.

As a paint-by-numbers version of what’s supposed to sell, “Bridesmaids” attempts to present a heroine who is supposed to be lovably down on her luck in love and life, faced with a big huge conflict (my BFF wants to be a Disney princess?) that’s supposed to transform her. By the end of the movie, you’re liable to feel hungover, hateful and anti-social. If this turns out to be a viral campaign for stabbing your eyes out and becoming a hermit, it will have succeeded. As a quirky chick flick that appeals to both the

hurting dumped and the hopeful beloved, it comes off more stilted than paper-bag puppet theater, more pessimistic than a tear-stained teenage diary and more glitteringly hateful than “Toddlers and Tiaras.”

Written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo, (who cast herself as “Person No. 1 in Coffee Place” in her only other acting credit, an episode of what sounds like a dreadful, middle school sex ed video “In the

Motherhood”), “Bridesmaids” is a diarrhea-joke smear on the career of Paul Feig, who wrote the funny, so-sensitive-it-hurt “Freaks and Geeks.” The women she meets are suffering from, variously, teenage

sons masturbating everywhere, obesity, Pixar-addicted virginity, or ditzy loneliness that can only be cured by sushi, wine and peanut brittle while the husband works. None of them are satisfied in love or

sex. And, in her loneliest moments, when Annie breaks out her old cooking gear and creates one of those haute couture cupcakes that would have been cutting edge for a week in 2001 on the Lower East

Side, she looks as miserable — and as resigned to it — as any of those hideous new rivals.

No, it’s not 100 percent “Red Cockroaches” — read my review of the worst movie ever made here — it’s not that level of awfulness.

There’s a cute Irish love interest (Chris O’Dowd), whose approach to acting is so different from everyone else’s, he might as well have been cut out of a different, better movie. Most of the “destination” pre-wedding events are deliciously horrible in a fly-on-the-wall way, where you’re thankful you weren’t actually invited in real life, lest you literally drown yourself in the punch to escape. Wiig’s funniest when pretending to be doped on pills and scotch given to her by the ditzy beauty who’s become Lillian’s new best friend, or when she’s smashing a giant cookie and trying to tear down a lawn-sized chocolate fountain.

I emphasize “most.” A scene where the bridal party gets post-Brazilian food sharts in an appointment-only dress fitting, resulting in one of them using the bathroom in a sink — and another, in the street outside — makes one wish there was such a thing as a mental laxative.

This tortuous, atrocious farce will do more than make you not want to be a single, female wedding party member.

“Bridesmaids” disdains human contact, in any form. Forced to watch it, you could very well end up not wanting to be half of a couple, part of a group of friends, or a member of the human race itself.

Ashley O’Dell reviews movies that aren’t in the theater anymore. She lives in North Hollywood, near the In-N-Out Burger.