December 24, 2015 -- This episodic sex comedy reminded me of Woody Allen's “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* But Were Afraid to Ask” (1972). It isn't as funny, or as imaginative, but it is a similar kind of film. It is a series of comedy skits based around different kinds of sexual fetishes.

The first episode features sexual masochism. A wife requests that her husband sneak up on her at some unannounced occasion and rape her. What could possibly go wrong? We find out eventually when the husband ends up in the hospital after staging an elaborate rape scenario that is a little too convincing.

Another episode involves role play fetishism, which works at first, until the husband gets carried away with his acting in these sexual role playing games. At first, this is funny, but eventually it becomes a serious problem in the marriage.

One episode involves dacryphilia, in which the wife derives sexual pleasure from seeing her husband cry. Once she discovers this upon the death of her husband's father, she goes to great lengths to get her husband to cry as often as possible, but she never tells him why she is doing this. After a while, her husband becomes suspicious of her various activities which result in his sadness, and it becomes a strain on their marriage.

Another episode involves somnophilia, sexual arousal from watching a person sleep. When his wife accidentally takes a powerful sleeping drug, her husband gets into the habit of having sex with his unconscious wife. This ethical problem also leads to him not getting enough sleep at night. His wife gets suspicious and thinks he is having an affair. This leads to very dire consequences.

The phone sex episode is probably the funniest of this lot, at least until the very last incident, which only marginally related to the phone sex anyway. Monica (played by Erin James) works at a phone relay center, assisting deaf callers to communicate by phone, two-way video and sign language. She gets involved in an embarrassing call made by Sam (T.J. Power of “The Sapphires”) to a phone sex business. She has to relay the phone sex talk between Sam and a woman at the other end of the line, who says things meant to arouse Sam.

Over the course of a lengthy conversation, Monica and Sam find themselves attracted to each other. Sam finds his conversation with Monica more fun than the phone sex call was. Another recurring story element involves a registered sex offender who is required by law to notify his neighbors of his criminal past when he moves into a neighborhood. He bakes cookies and delivers them to his new neighbors. The running joke is that people seem so taken with the cookies that they don't pay attention when he informs them that he is a sex offender.

The film is an odd mixture of comedy and melodrama, with some tragedy thrown in. I would have liked it better had the film stuck to the comic elements and dumped the rest of it. Still, there are some funny comic scenes in this film, enough for me to recommend it. This film rates a B.

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Copyright © 2015 Robert Roten. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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