Surprisingly incoherent and boring

Overrated

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

If the folks who made A Knight's Tale all impregnated a sibling and the genetically defective results of those unions all grew up to make an anachronistic, Renaissance Italy sex comedy, it would look an awful lot like Virgin Territory. There's some quality nudity here but an almost total lack of laughs and a host of poor storytelling choices.Lorenzo (Hayden Christiansen) is a young gambler in love with the beautiful Pampinea (Mischa Barton) and on the run from the rich and menacing Gerbino (Tim Roth). Pampinea is also lusted after by Gerbino, even though she's promised in marriage to a Russian count (Matthew Rhys). Lorenzo has to flee Florence to escape Gerbino and his men. Pampinea, some of her friends and a painter impersonating a priest (Craig Parkinson) also decide to leave town, partly because of Gerbino and partly because of the plague.Lorenzo and Pampinea end up in a convent full of sex-crazed nuns while her friends wind up waylaid by some bandits. After some generalized ribaldry, including a police-style penis line up, everybody winds up at a country villa where Gerbino tries to force Pampinea to marry him while Lorenzo and the Russian count try to stop it. The bad guy falls down a well and everybody else locks lips with the sex partner of their dreams.I think I've seen enough film to make a plea. For the love of Zeus, stop with all the voice over narration! It's fairly rare in big budget Hollywood fare, but narration has overrun indy flicks like out of control kudzu. It's one of the laziest crutches filmmakers lean on and you find it over and over and over again in independent cinema. Whether it's used as a shortcut for exposition, characterization and plot mechanics or as a feeble attempt at depth and profundity that doesn't exist in the rest of a script, narration has become so common in a certain class of filmmaking that it's almost become a big, fat warning sign. If you're watching a movie and you hear a narrator within the first 30 seconds, you're probably better off bailing on the film right then and there.That's what I should have done when the voice over from the fake priest started in Virgin Territory. It's intrusive, it takes the audience's attention and emotional investment away from the main characters and, worst of all, the narration is intentionally written to be the most overtly funny thing in the movie. The fake priest is given more deliberately humorous things to say in his narration than all the other characters' dialog put together. The narration isn't all that funny but even if it were, it would still be a mistake to do it that way.The rest of Virgin Territory lived down to that early warning sign. Just as an example, a huge portion of the film's middle is given over to how one of Pampinea's friends is a bitchy cocktease who alternately berates and frustrates her virgin boyfriend. Pampinea, Lorenzo, Gerbino and the Russian count are just forgotten about, and then the cocktease and her boyfriend are forgotten about so a second friend of Pampinea can be brought to the fore and made the second most important female character in the story.And I have to bring up the final sword fight between Lorenzo and Garbino because it's one of the worst structured battles in the history of fiction. First, the movie sets it up that Lorenzo and Garbino will fight and if Garbino wins, he'll then have to fight the Russian count. So the bad guy is facing an unfair challenge to begin with. Then Garbino has to battle Lorenzo on the edge of a deep well after it's been established that Garbino is afraid of heights, putting him at an additional disadvantage. Even if Garbino were the most vile person imaginable, having the deck stacked so clearly against him destroys the good vs. evil dynamic of the climax.Virgin Territory does feature the impressive physique of Kate Groombridge and a few other actresses take their tops off. There's nothing else of value here.

I love historical films and this movie appeared to be a fun filled, sexy love triangle romp through the beautiful Florence countryside. Against everything I stand for, I bought it without watching it first. BIG MISTAKE!!! The only redeeming features of this film was the countryside (magnificent), Tim Roth's acting, and the costumes (historical with a modern twist). Everything else was horrible!!!! The first 3/4 of the film is jumbled and apparently, plot less. So they fill it with boobs galore and winged penises. The love of Hayden C.'s character for Micsha B.'s wasn't even noticeable and lacked chemistry.To sum it up I'd call it "a wannabe soft core pron". Ended up returning it for a better movie. And never again will I buy before renting!

I found this film on the shelves of a French hypermarket on a day trip to Calais. Presented in the same font and style as the 'American Pie' films, I have to say that the local French title "Medieval pie - Territoires vierges" did stand out, which was possibly the intention of the DVD marketing company, trying to trade on the success of a similar and more successful series of teen comedy films. Even now, after the event, I'm still not sure whether any of the cast or crew of 'Medieval Pie' have any involvement with the 'American Pie' franchise at all. I'm doubtful. I get the feeling that this movie will be known under a variety of titles in a variety of markets, and that alone should set the alarm bells ringing in the heads of most sane movie reviewers.There are a few familiar faces on display. Hayden Christensen, Mischa Barton and Tim Roth are the three most obvious 'names', with 'Little Britain's' David Walliams appearing in a blink-and-you'll-almost-miss-him cameo. The main problem is that all these actors are playing characters with hard-to-remember names. Barton is Pampinea, Christensen is Lorenzo (who for some reason masquerades as a deaf-and-dumb gardener in a convent where for some reason all the nuns have sex with him, a central joke that gets tired very quickly, even with all the nudity) while Roth is the main villain, Gerbino de la Ratto. I was rather more impressed with Matthew Rhys' Russian Count Dzerzhinsky, who rattled off his name and lineage on several occasions without missing a beat - I could have done with a memory like that to remember exactly who was who. It was a struggle at times.My favourite scene was probably when the two women who get captured (Rosalind Halstead & Kate Groombridge I believe) try and escape by tricking their guards into dropping their trousers and lining up in order of size and then creating an argument about whether you start small and work up, or start large and work down (or even start in the middle!). That was fun. The main love story involving Barton and her three suitors (Christensen, Roth and Rhys) is perhaps not so successful, and the less said about the sex-obsessed nuns the better. It's an old fantasy for sure, imagining what nuns get up to behind closed convent doors, but not especially original.I've seen worse comedies for sure - anything involving Aaron Seltzer & Jason Friedberg for one thing, but I have seen better too. I suppose for the genre it represents, this sits somewhere in the middle of the pack, so even though it did bypass the cinemas and go straight-to-DVD, it's not really that bad. It deserves one viewing at least, but whether it will hold up to multiple screenings is much less certain. I'm not sure it will. I guess what I'm really saying, is wait until the sales - don't pay full price for it - unless you have a thing about nuns getting naked, in which case this is a 10/10 movie for sure. For me though, it's just a five.

All the basics you want in a film. Fun, villains, sex, humor, heroes, and a happy ending. But not predictable. No intense thinking material, yet there is intense thinking underneath.It might be viewed as a light-hearted Elizabeth the Golden Age, though on a smaller scale and in a different part of England. Out in the country where the big bad wolves and princesses in distress mingle.Makes me wonder why it didn't do much better at the box office. It certainly deserved to. I guess it's hard to market a film that may seem old, religious, and historical. In reality, the religion and history serve as a backdrop and the film never feels old.Tim Roth leads a cast of great acting. He makes the villain both hate-able and amusing.