Verdict: They don't make a Dramamine strong enough.

By CHRIS HEWITT
Knight Ridder Newspapers

"Boat Trip" may be anti-homosexual, but it's so anti-woman it's hard to tell.

It's a lame, gender-mixed, mistaken-identity, cross-dressing comedy: "Some Like It Tepid," if you will. Cuba Gooding Jr. stars as a lovelorn bachelor who accidentally books passage on a gay cruise, along with his best friend (Horatio Sanz, whose comedy has an air of desperation, as if he's willing to do anything for a laugh except be funny). You can imagine the hilarity that follows.

You'll have to imagine it, in fact, because the script is witless and obvious. The gay men on the cruise are fairly friendly to Gooding and Sanz, and the movie busts as many stereotypes as it affectionately buys into. But, meanwhile, the women are dumb, mean and nymphomaniacal. It makes for a very strange movie, combining beefcake and boobs in a way that, as near as I can tell, is designed to appeal to closet cases who subscribe to Hustler in order to prove their heterosexuality.

The rest of us will have to look elsewhere for a laugh this weekend. At the preview screening of "Boat Trip" this week, a woman kept walking up and down the stadium-seating portion of the theater, passing by me more than a dozen times. She fascinated me. Was she in the wrong theater? Did her friends ditch her? Was she lost? Or, the most likely explanation, did she find the faces of her fellow moviegoers more entertaining than the wretched movie she was turning her back on?