This is one of those bad movies that has several good things in it, but the filmmakers obviously never recognized what those good things were. So, it has roughly the same effect as that hot 16 year old in high school that was always flirting but never went all the way. It teases you just long enough to make your eventual disappointment all the more frustrating.
Daphne (Lauren Holly) is a woman who looks like she's been ridden hard and put away wet. She's taking care of Tom (Angelo Spizzirri), a younger man with very debilitating medical problems. Tom's father, the Reverend Ethol, is supposed to be paying for Tom's care but he's not. Daphne goes down to the Reverend's church/cult to demand some money. She only gets the brush off from the Reverend's right hand man (Billy Zane, who really should be acting in better movies than this. The guy was in Titanic, for Pete's sake!) So, Daphne takes an aluminum baseball bat, clonks a couple of guys in the head and kidnaps Tom's sister Casey for ransom.
While that's going on, we also watch the marriage of Bill (Angus MacFadyen) and Alexis (Deena Dill) blow apart. Bill is one of those stereotypical psychology professors who is so emotionally repressed, his wife has an affair with another woman. Not because Alexis is actually gay, but she's just so desperate to get some sort of reaction out of Bill. She doesn't get it, and Bill ends up meeting Faruza (Lacey Chabert). Faruza has been attending Bill's classes and is so infatuated with him that just listening to him talk gets her sexually excited.
It turns out that Daphne, Tom, Casey, Bill and Faruza all end up at the same hotel in the middle of the desert. There they are joined by Marcy (Jill Bennett), a raven-tressed, lesbian hitwoman who just got dumped by her girlfriend and has been hired by the church/cult to take care of their little Daphne problem. Wacky hijinks ensue, like an episode of Scooby-Doo mixed with Reservoir Dogs.
There are a couple of good things in The Pleasure Drivers, but you'll miss one if you blink and the other just goes completely off the rails. The first good thing is a flash of genuine depth in Daphne. Before the character becomes a complete moron to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer, Lauren Holly is able to show some real inner conflict in this woman. She truly does want to take care of Tom and needs money for that, but she also wants a lot of money from the church/cult because she just wants a lot of money. There are instances where Holly lets us see primitive greed struggling with idiotic nobility in Daphne and it's somewhat entrancing.
The other good thing in this film is the relationship, such as it is, between Bill and Faruza. The repressed man and the liberated woman is one of the all-time movie clichés, but it really works here. Primarily that's because Angus MacFadyen goes beyond cliché with Bill. He creates a man who looks attractive and functional on the surface. It's not until you get to know Bill that you find out he's so alienated from his own emotions and his own life that he's constantly analyzing himself and others into a tape recorder he keeps with him. MacFadyen really captures the disturbed unwillingness to interact with others that fools women into thinking it's niceness and vulnerability. Lacey Chabert also hits the mark with Faruza being willfully blind to how she uses sexual aggressiveness to wall off feelings she doesn't want to deal with.
But we never see enough of Daphne's depth and the story basically abandons the Bill/Faruza dynamic so it can get to the ironic and nihilistically hip violence. The movie also treats lesbian assassin Marcy as though she is a lot more meaningful than she actually is. She's much closer to plot device than human being, but the filmmakers seem to think there's something significant about her without ever doing anything significant with her. Tom is also wildly inconsistent throughout the entire film. He goes from being mentally spastic to acutely aware, physically weak to personally capable, emotionally crippled to stoicly resolved and back and forth for no reason except the script requires it. Throw in a plot that's not much more complicated than See Spot Run, Daphne having a handgun that must have come from an old time Western because it never needs to be reloaded and a double ending that pathetically clutches at seriousness, and you've got a movie that thoroughly crushes any hopes that might have been raised by its few good qualities.
We also get to see Angus MacFadyn naked. Now, anyone who watches movies with a critical eye can recognize the terrible way actresses are exploited when it comes to nudity. And while I'll admit I can enjoy some gratuitous disrobing, I appreciate women who don't want to do that and applaud filmmakers who resist it. But the modern conceit of not having naked women and instead splashing bare man ass across the screen has got to stop. Maybe at one point it was funny and a bit subversive, but now it's so played out and artificial. It's become something that independent movies do only because it's something that other independent movies have done.
The Pleasure Drivers does turn awfully stupid toward the end, with two final scenes that are so misplaced it's as though pages from two other movies got stabled to the end of this script. Aside from that, it's not altogether horrible. If you give it a look, it might click with you. But if you've watched the first 15 minutes and you're not enjoying it, you can go ahead and turn it off because it won't be getting any better.
Daphne (Lauren Holly) is a woman who looks like she's been ridden hard and put away wet. She's taking care of Tom (Angelo Spizzirri), a younger man with very debilitating medical problems. Tom's father, the Reverend Ethol, is supposed to be paying for Tom's care but he's not. Daphne goes down to the Reverend's church/cult to demand some money. She only gets the brush off from the Reverend's right hand man (Billy Zane, who really should be acting in better movies than this. The guy was in Titanic, for Pete's sake!) So, Daphne takes an aluminum baseball bat, clonks a couple of guys in the head and kidnaps Tom's sister Casey for ransom.
While that's going on, we also watch the marriage of Bill (Angus MacFadyen) and Alexis (Deena Dill) blow apart. Bill is one of those stereotypical psychology professors who is so emotionally repressed, his wife has an affair with another woman. Not because Alexis is actually gay, but she's just so desperate to get some sort of reaction out of Bill. She doesn't get it, and Bill ends up meeting Faruza (Lacey Chabert). Faruza has been attending Bill's classes and is so infatuated with him that just listening to him talk gets her sexually excited.
It turns out that Daphne, Tom, Casey, Bill and Faruza all end up at the same hotel in the middle of the desert. There they are joined by Marcy (Jill Bennett), a raven-tressed, lesbian hitwoman who just got dumped by her girlfriend and has been hired by the church/cult to take care of their little Daphne problem. Wacky hijinks ensue, like an episode of Scooby-Doo mixed with Reservoir Dogs.
There are a couple of good things in The Pleasure Drivers, but you'll miss one if you blink and the other just goes completely off the rails. The first good thing is a flash of genuine depth in Daphne. Before the character becomes a complete moron to serve the Almighty Plot Hammer, Lauren Holly is able to show some real inner conflict in this woman. She truly does want to take care of Tom and needs money for that, but she also wants a lot of money from the church/cult because she just wants a lot of money. There are instances where Holly lets us see primitive greed struggling with idiotic nobility in Daphne and it's somewhat entrancing.
The other good thing in this film is the relationship, such as it is, between Bill and Faruza. The repressed man and the liberated woman is one of the all-time movie clichés, but it really works here. Primarily that's because Angus MacFadyen goes beyond cliché with Bill. He creates a man who looks attractive and functional on the surface. It's not until you get to know Bill that you find out he's so alienated from his own emotions and his own life that he's constantly analyzing himself and others into a tape recorder he keeps with him. MacFadyen really captures the disturbed unwillingness to interact with others that fools women into thinking it's niceness and vulnerability. Lacey Chabert also hits the mark with Faruza being willfully blind to how she uses sexual aggressiveness to wall off feelings she doesn't want to deal with.
But we never see enough of Daphne's depth and the story basically abandons the Bill/Faruza dynamic so it can get to the ironic and nihilistically hip violence. The movie also treats lesbian assassin Marcy as though she is a lot more meaningful than she actually is. She's much closer to plot device than human being, but the filmmakers seem to think there's something significant about her without ever doing anything significant with her. Tom is also wildly inconsistent throughout the entire film. He goes from being mentally spastic to acutely aware, physically weak to personally capable, emotionally crippled to stoicly resolved and back and forth for no reason except the script requires it. Throw in a plot that's not much more complicated than See Spot Run, Daphne having a handgun that must have come from an old time Western because it never needs to be reloaded and a double ending that pathetically clutches at seriousness, and you've got a movie that thoroughly crushes any hopes that might have been raised by its few good qualities.
We also get to see Angus MacFadyn naked. Now, anyone who watches movies with a critical eye can recognize the terrible way actresses are exploited when it comes to nudity. And while I'll admit I can enjoy some gratuitous disrobing, I appreciate women who don't want to do that and applaud filmmakers who resist it. But the modern conceit of not having naked women and instead splashing bare man ass across the screen has got to stop. Maybe at one point it was funny and a bit subversive, but now it's so played out and artificial. It's become something that independent movies do only because it's something that other independent movies have done.
The Pleasure Drivers does turn awfully stupid toward the end, with two final scenes that are so misplaced it's as though pages from two other movies got stabled to the end of this script. Aside from that, it's not altogether horrible. If you give it a look, it might click with you. But if you've watched the first 15 minutes and you're not enjoying it, you can go ahead and turn it off because it won't be getting any better.