Film

Blockers

Name: Blockers
Genre: Comedy
Released: 2018
Cast: Leslie Mann, John Cena, Ike Barinholtz, Kathryn Newton, Geraldine Viswanathan

Blockers takes the raunchy teen-sex-comedy template and flips the camera onto the parents, turning their panic into the joke. Leslie Mann, John Cena and Ike Barinholtz play a mismatched trio whose horror at their daughters' plans curdles into escalating slapstick, though the film keeps enough sympathy for the girls that it never feels punitive. Loud, silly, occasionally sweet.

TMDb rating

6.3

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But It's gentler and more sincere than Blockers, so if you wanted more chaos and fewer feelings you might find it a touch earnest.

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It's the genre's founding document — the first mainstream comedy to treat teenagers' sex lives as a subject worth taking seriously and laughing at simultaneously, the exact tightrope Blockers walks decades later.

Long before Blockers, this ensemble comedy treated teenage sex, awkwardness and Spicoli-grade hedonism with a frankness that shocked audiences, and its DNA runs through every raunchy comedy since.

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Same engine, opposite costume: an overprotective parent trying to control a daughter's emerging independence and sexuality, told through a completely different genre, register and audience.

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Virgin Tales2012no page yet

It's the real-world equivalent of the film's premise minus the joke: parents genuinely organizing their lives around controlling their daughters' sexual choices, played completely straight.

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