“Women.  Are.  Morons.”

To hear the review

     This is the extent of Stanny’s (Stevie Long) knowledge about women.  They like to be treated like dirt, they don’t like men who are nice, blah blah blah.  I don’t know how often I have heard this exact dialogue in movies, but the more I hear it the more I get tired of it.  And it doesn’t become any more true with repetition.  The fact that Stanny is right, when it comes to the one women he gets to have sex with, doesn’t make his broad-brush painting of the entire gender any more accurate.  Then again, Stanny has the most intelligent and insightful dialogue in all of Strictly Sexual.  That isn’t a good thing.

     The thing is, I badly wanted to like this movie.  Strictly Sexual has an interesting premise, where two hot young women decide that all they want from men is good, regular sex.  They hire two hot young studs to live in their pool house, paying them to be at their beck and call for intercourse, and nothing else.  This is an interesting conceit, and it pays off a little bit initially.  The idea that these four people could live in the same house, with feelings and emotion taken completely out of the equation, means that they can talk utterly frankly about sex with each other, and although it might make the girls angry to hear the bold, unadulterated truth, they end up thinking they are better off because of it.

     However, Strictly Sexual runs out of gas pretty quickly.  The biggest problem with the movie is that for such a sexually suggestive film (there is one awkward scene where one of the guys teaches one of the girls how to have anal sex), it suffers from an utter lack of balls.  The movie just doesn’t have the guts to go all the way.  It tries to be sexy, and edgy, and dirty.  It features characters who talk about anal and oral sex, who have filthy and kinky sex with each other, and so on and so forth.  But the kinky and dirty stuff feels totally contrived, like they are really forcing the dialogue.  It’s apparent that the people who wrote this film (Long, it happens, was the writer as well) are not familiar with a lot of dirty talk or edgy conversation.

     So what we get is people talking to each other like they’re in one of those late-night cable TV softcore porno movies with the word “Undercover” in the title.  And when the sexy kinky edgy stuff isn’t being awkwardly shoehorned into the movie, it’s disappointingly PG.  Amber Benson and Kristen Kerr are two smoking hot young women, and they are both charming in their own way in Strictly Sexual, but they never get naked.  This is a movie about all-out sexuality and no-holds barred male prostitution, right?  The idea that no one - not even the men - shows so much as a butt cheek is ludicrous.  They are always having sex with each other.  But no nudity?  Get real.  Boobs wouldn’t be gratuitous here - they would make sense.

     Also, the subject matter itself isn’t fully fleshed out.  So to speak.  The two girls hire the two guys, but each girl has one guy to herself.  There seems to be a place in this movie for the swapping of partners - after all, they’re just prostitutes - and the jealousies that could come with that.  It might have created a few interesting situations.  Instead we get one-dimensional characters who do one-dimensional things, and although they’re all supposed to be changed by the end of the movie, and learn valuable lessons, they really haven’t, and they’re all basically the same people, and they’re all still pretty boring.

     The concept of Strictly Sexual is an admittedly interesting one.  I like the idea.  I just don’t like the movie.  It feels either sissily PG or totally contrived.  Even when these four people fight, it’s stupid.  These people would never say the things that lead to these fights.  Sometimes the film is both unnecessarily PG and contrived.  Ostensibly a romantic comedy - a dirty romantic comedy - there is little that’s funny about the movie and even less that’s romantic.  Strictly Sexual comes out on DVD May 12th from Alliance Films.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 5:37 am and is filed under 2007, Amber Benson, Comedy, Joel Viertel, Johann Urb, Kristen Kerr, Stevie Long. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.