• Produced and directed by Diane Diamond and Melissa Sacre
• Written by Jeff Williams
• Starring
  • Tammy Thorn
  • David Sokol
  • Ivan Mescalero
  • Shawntel Simms
  • Jennifer Siekes

As far as I can discover, this movie shares no personnel with the previous DVD releases from Central Film Co. that I’ve reviewed, Living Nightmare (2001) and Don’t Turn Around (2004). However, it should come as no surprise that the outside projects which CFC recruits for microbudget distribution are kindred with their home-grown releases in terms of budget, production value, and general levels of talent and skill before and behind the camera.

In other words, yeah, this movie sucks on toast.

It does at least manage to suck in some different ways. Unlike the previous two titles which were meant to be horror movies, this one means to be a drama. The biggest difference is that, instead of watching vapid, uninteresting people scurry around in a panic, we get to watch vapid, uninteresting people go about their valueless lives.

I hesitate to even tell you what the movie’s about, because you won’t want to believe that a movie about strippers and a Bible-inspired madman can be so uninteresting. But trust me, this is quite possibly the least interesting movie one can possibly make involving strippers and a Bible-inspired madman.

Please, give us the old “I’m almost eighteen, I’m not a child” speech. Because that always holds so much water.

First up, you might reasonably wonder how I know John (David Sokol) to be a Bible-inspired madman. Well, the fact that we first meet him as he reads from the Adam and Eve story by candlelight, shadows dripping from his perpetual grimace, flames reflecting from his pierced nipples… (What, doesn’t everybody read the Torah topless?) Yeah, those are all good clues. Oh, and the momentary scene we have with his therapist in which John blames himself for his wife’s death and declares that he doesn’t care whether he lives or dies kinda clinches it. (To which the therapist responds with a clean bill of health.)

Our other main character — in fact, our main protagonist — is Candace (Tammy Thorn), and just so we’ll be interested in her, we meet her as she performs a pole-dancing routine. (Doesn’t work.) Her story, told in flashback, is this: she’s a naive seventeen-year-old with really lousy taste in friends. Her Friday night is spent with a couple of guys and a couple of girls at a barely-furnished apartment, where they smoke some weed and drink so they won’t have to realize how utterly bored they are. One of the guys so brilliantly puts something in her drink, and she ends up at the (off-screen) hospital with an overdose. Which turns out to be okay, except for the fact that her weekend activities really piss off her mother (co-director Diane Diamond), who grounds her. I think we’re supposed to consider the mother’s reaction at this point unreasonable and borderline fascist, which means that any hidden dregs of sympathy I may have had for Candace are utterly vaporized at this point.

Granted, Mom does go a little apeshit when the other guy from the “party,” Roy (Ivan Mescalero), shows up on the doorstep in the middle of their argument. (He just wants to return Candace’s purse.) Mom takes the occasion to start throttling Candace, so Roy gets her out of there and finds her a place to stay… with Sharon (Shawntel Simms), who makes her living as an exotic dancer. All coming clear to you yet?

Um… No. Lower.

On Candace’s first night dancing, who should show up but John, watching her with his perpetual snarl hanging on his face. When her set is done, he gets her attention and makes a good impression by telling her she’s different, she’s different, she’s not like the other girls, she’s different, different, not like the other girls, different. The poetry of his language and the obvious depth of his reasoning win her over, and she literally takes up with the first man to see her pole-dance.

Now. This is the point at which the plot description gets even more useless than it has been to this point. The rest of the movie is split between:

- Candace and Sharon spending time with Roy, who’s a professional drug-pusher. Watching these poor, shallow people, one can almost understand the whole urge to get high, because otherwise their lives are so bare and dull that they might bore themselves to death. You’ve heard of “the banality of evil”? What we’ve got here is “the banality of cluelessness,” a parade of people so lost they don’t even know they’re lost, living lives which are occupied 95% by the functions of their autonomous nervous systems. I categorized this movie earlier as a “drama,” but that’s only by default; to have drama, you have to have personality conflicts, and to have personality conflicts you have to have personalities.

“So, this Billy Idol Lookalike Contest you were telling me about…”

- Candace and the other girls giving lapdances to, and going to non-starter “parties” with, vapid customers. An alternate title for this movie might be, Men Who Use “Yeah, Yeah, ‘S’Up, ‘S’Up” as a Pickup Line, and the Women Who Respond to Them.

- Candace and John going on occasional dates, which mostly means going back to his place to admire his etchings. No, really, he does sketches and paintings and stuff, mostly based on biblical themes. It’s sad that John, one-note character that he is, has the most visible personality of anyone in the movie, if by “personality” we mean “facial expression.”

I think we’re supposed to see some sort of dramatic tension here between the two halves of Candace’s life — spiraling into drug use with Sharon and Roy on the one hand, and spending time with John who wants to think of her as some kind of angel on the other. Unfortunately, Tammy Thorn as Candace plays her role as if she were comparison-shopping handtowels at Target. Her character is wholly passive to the events of of what’s supposed to be her story; things happen, and she’s there. She can barely bring herself to react to her own life. How, I ask, could any viewer possibly exhibit any interest or involvement in a story which doesn’t appear to even engage its protagonist?

“Nope, not drunk enough to put this on my resume yet! Refill!”

And detailing all of the “macro” inadequacies of the movie doesn’t begin to explain the omnipresent problems present on a detail level. The dialogue is lifeless and awkward. The acting only achieves verisimilitude when attempting to show how utterly boring the characters are. The editing seems to have been done under the influence of a brain tumor. And…

Look, don’t take this the wrong way, but we’ve got a multi-ethnic cast here — a WASP majority, with some Latino, Jewish, and African-American characters… So why does every single person in the movie listen to the same set of “urban” music? In keeping with the overall banality of the movie, the soundtrack is overflowing with interchangeable “soul” (guaranteed 100% soul-free!) and watered-down hiphop. And if you think I’m being racist by bringing this up, imagine how incongruous it would seem to watch a movie with a majority African-American cast and a soundtrack occupied entirely by country ballads, or celtic folktunes.

The movie finally ends with some violence, demonstrating that the title is more a prediction of how long the movie will last rather than a description of the plot. And then, before the closing credits roll, we’re treated to a long and wholly unironic text quote on the nature of true happiness from… Billy Graham? While I appreciate a sincere inspirational thought as well as the next guy, coming as it does at the end of a feature which has made a concerted effort to show us people who don’t even know they’re making all the wrong choices… It’s much more puzzling than laudable.

No comment.

So. Central Film Co.’s position as the last-ditch distributor of consistently crummy do-it-yourself features is safe once more. And I need to go scrub my frontal lobes with a bottle brush just to stimulate the bloodflow again.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 3
• breasts: 1 (that’s right — a movie about the sordid life of an exotic dancer contains one accidental breast)
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 0
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0