Cue The Tequila

Over spring break a few weeks back, two sets of adults backed by two major media conglomerates each put a bunch of teenagers in a hotel suite in Cancun, Mexico, force-fed them alcohol, sent them on their wobbly way to wet-T-shirt contests and let the movie cameras roll. Both believed they had simultaneously stumbled upon the map for the Holy Grail of teen comedies, the one that eliminates the genre's most vulnerable point: a script.

In their race to be the first to take reality television to the movie theater, the two production teams were evenly matched in their mastery of the art of filming mating rituals of the young. At one end of the beach was The Real Cancun, produced by Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jonathan Murray, who created the Ur-reality TV show The Real World for MTV. On the other, a few miles away, Mike Fleiss, the man who brought us The Bachelor, was making The Quest. Both movies had similar casting strategies, focusing on the teen-comedy trope of an eager male virgin, but Bunim-Murray had an edge: female identical twins. It was not a fair fight.

After both groups pulled out all the stops to finish their movie first, Fleiss blinked, postponing The Quest indefinitely. Although he declined to comment, Universal Studios claims the movie, about six guys trying to get their dorky friend initiated into sex, is timeless and doesn't need to be rushed for a near spring-break release. Bunim and Murray, who dragged editors and equipment down to Mexico so they could release The Real Cancun this Friday, a week ahead of schedule, have no such pretensions. They, after all, have a movie with twins.

We are not deep into the film before those twins remove their tops and grind against each other during the wet-T-shirt contest (ending up in third place; you don't want to know what the winners did), gently setting the tone of the film. In between the scenes of plastered guys propositioning women, there are montages of such wholesome teen activities as swimming with dolphins and bungee jumping. But mostly it's drunken sex.

How is it that real life provided so many classic frat-boy-comedy moments? "By the end of the week I felt my teeth eroding from the margarita mix," says Roxanne, a sophomore at Texas Tech and one of the twins. "There was never a sober moment. We woke up with margaritas." Alcohol, logic dictates, has the same effect on films as bad writing: it turns young people into cliches. Not only do the 16 people sharing the phat Mexican hotel suite make out indiscriminately, curse and say stupid things, but they also indirectly deliver the requisite moral lesson of a teen comedy: casual sex, even for loutish frat boys, is a pain. "In our house, the girls got all hurt if we brought another girl home," says Matt, 20, an Arizona State student. "They acted like we were a big family, but we'd only known each other for a few days."

The Real Cancun is The Real World as if it were on Cinemax: all the drama plus cursing, nudity and an innovative, nonmilitary use of an infrared camera. But it's better than The Real World because the drama is compressed and simplified. You don't have to film an argument about who stuck a finger in the peanut-butter jar when there's a constant stream of teens hooking up poolside.