How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town

By Di Golding

Mailed on May 12, 2016


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Dear Alvin Sun
Key Grip

Dear Alvin,

Perhaps you’ve heard a saying in your profession that the only difference between porn and art is lighting. How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town is certainly not pornography, but neither is it art. Instead, it is a decidedly ribald yet frustratingly vanilla adult comedy that has difficulty maintaining its, um, shall we say spark.

Your department is full of terms that would give the teenaged set the full-on giggles – grip, mount, speed rail, Leatherman, C-clamp – and it’s similarly unenlightened juveniles that literally run young Cassie Cranston out of town. Years later, and now a famous sex columnist, Cassie returns to Beaver’s Ridge on the occasion of her estranged mother’s death to find that she has been left nothing in the will, her high school boyfriend Adam is now married to mean girl Heather, and she will have to pay back her book advance if she can’t deliver a juicy treatment ASAP. Having once devoted a scathing column to the prudish nature of her hometown, Cassie finds herself confronted by former schoolmates and friends who want to prove they are as open-minded as big city folk by holding an orgy.

You wouldn’t be faulted for finding the premise on the turgid side. If the plot were a lighting rig, you’d likely be perturbed by its flimsy structural integrity. Cassie’s priggish mother was a famous children’s author, character traits that seem to exist only to highlight how different they are. And this isn’t the only bloated and improbable thread. Cassie has a secret that can best be described as unconvincing, and her ex, Adam is married to the cartoonishly uptight WASP, Heather, who has her own winking motives for attending the orgy. Nebbish neighbour Seth, the town loser, shows up every now and then to deliver non sequiturs. Other randy friends and acquaintances appear with varying stages of character development to try to kick start the town’s libido. A town, which it seems, operates with its own ridiculous yet plodding internal logic.

Thankfully, the cast is as solid as your most reliable truss. When the script is funny, it’s laugh out loud hilarious, but when it attempts to plumb emotional depths it feels mawkish and false. Regardless, the cast members – namely Katharine Isabelle, James McGowan, Tommie-Amber Pirie, Ennis Esmer, and Mark O’Brien - go all in, providing some of the film’s most memorable and deliciously cringe-y moments. It’s a shame the monotonous two-shots and predictable staging bring the momentum of the film’s most rollicking exchanges to a dead halt. That said, you could have rigged the camera for the scene with the way too pregnant orgy attendee so it was upside down and out of focus and it still would have been one of the most outrageously hysterical things I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Much like an orgy, it takes many willing and able participants to make a great film. But everybody has to fully commit to the enterprise. The talented cast was willing to go balls-deep with the mostly funny script, but the cinematography and art direction were flaccid at best. Ultimately, getting to a mutually advantageous climax requires more than just a few warm bodies. I got frustratingly close, but unfortunately I just couldn’t “get there” this time.

Cheers,

Di

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