I know what I’m about to say is ridiculous, but I was disappointed in Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds in Love, a Fox TV movie about now-main character Booger marrying into a nouveau riche family who, of course, hates nerds for no real reason. I talked about watching the third movie in the series last week and, with a few complaints, enjoyed the movie, but this one was hard not to turn off early on.

Unfortunately, once again, the movie gets plaid up for goofy laughs early on with Booger’s fiance’s mother smashing her head on a plate after hearing him talk about grabbing her daughter’s butt. Then, Booger accidentally throws a piece of beef at her face. Oh, and to get the beef, both Booger and the girl ran like cartoon characters. Oi. There’s also a number of scenes where the rich people get stuck with the nerds and, for some reason, even though Lewis is a highly successful man and all these people are in their 30s by this point, start chanting “Nerds, nerds, nerds!”

Speaking of the characters, don’t believe the cover, Timothy Busfield does not make an appearance. I’m not quite sure why they’d bother throwing him on the box, but whatever. The flick seems to pick up where the last one left off to an extent with some of the younger TriLambs from 3 showing up including the big fat guy and Lewis’ nephew Harold. Oh, Stan Gable has completely converted to nerdery at this point and is friends with our heroes and Ogre, who switched sides in 2 if memory serves comes to the proceedings as well. It’s strange that they brought in all these characters and seem to have trouble having things for them to do. It’s like they wrote a script that was too short and then had to pad it by showing Harold running off with one of the rich ladies to bone repeatedly and Stan getting the chicken pox almost immediately and holing up in a room. Neither of these events have any baring on the story, yet we keep cutting back to them.

My biggest problem, though, was a technical one. The editing on this movie was ridiculously terrible. These aren’t the kind of things I tend to notice, which should go to show how bad it was. Early on the scenes seemed pasted together awkwardly. I can’t tell you exactly what was bothering me, but it seemed off, like the actors kept moving around depending on which side of the scene was being shot at which time. It just felt off. The worst offense, though came when the big nerd was dancing on the floor. If memory serves he was busting some Michael Jackson dance moves, but between moves his hat kept appearing and reappearing, and we’re not talking slick Usher-like dance moves, they just used two completely different shots. I know it’s a TV movie, but COME ON.

I will give the movie this, the nerds who did return from the first two movies give really good performances. You remember why you liked them so much in the original flick, it’s mostly the newbies and the nerd-haters that make the movie feel stupid. I can buy a bunch of asshole college students hating nerds, but after a certain period of time, would anyone really care? I could see not liking Booger because he’s gross, but he’s not even the nerdiest of the bunch.

I just read on IMDb that not only was this a backdoor pilot for a Booger series that never appeared, but was also presented in 3D and Aeromavision. I’ll let Al Bundy explain

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Nerds in Love wasn’t so good, but it still bummed me out as much as getting to Halloween 6 and Jason Goes To Hell. I really liked these franchises and then they got dumped on pretty hard. Maybe this one will get resurrected like the others, but the real question is, are nerds still lame? Aren’t they kind of cool right now? I’d write it as a continuation with Lewis being a Bill Gates type and his kid, a jock, heading to Adams College and just see where it went from there. Let me know if you want the full pitch, Hollywood. I guarantee I can write it better than this thing.