College Road Trip

"If you take your underage children to see Batman and they're traumatised by it, you will do less damage to their soul than taking them to see College Road Trip" - Mark Kermode, BBC Radio 5live

College Road Trip was the film that conclusively proved Mark's maxim that "the nicer the movie, the nastier the people involved in making it." Since there's no pithy way to sum that rule up, here on Witterpedia we have called this the Martin Lawrence rule in honour of this movie.

As Mark was explaining the rule, Simon Mayo suggested that this implied that the editor of Blue Peter would be really evil. Mark was amazed at how brilliantly this fitted with his theory, since former Blue Peter editor Biddy Baxter was the chair of the BBFC panel that infamously doubled the number of cuts applied to Last House On The Left after Mark's expert witness testimony urging the film be passed uncut.

College Road Trip features Lawrence - "Eddie Murphy without the talent" - being "creepy and ghastly" as a policeman attempting to stop his own daughter from going to college in Georgetown. The only thing that sustained Mark through College Road Trip was that he would get to see some shots of Georgetown - where The Exorcist was filmed - at the end, only to find to his dismay that those bits had actually been shot in Connecticut.

It turned out that instead the film's one saving grace was the presence of Donny Osmond who also plays an over-protective father, but actually manages to do it with something approaching humour. That said, Simon reported that even Mrs Mayo - who was in the Donny Osmond fan club - couldn't find anything positive to say about the movie.