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Games People Play

2004, Movie, NR, 96 mins

Games People Play: Review

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Just as TV's Candid Camera prefigured reality shows like Punk'd and Scare Tactics, the Candid Camera feature WHAT DO YOU SAY TO A NAKED LADY? (1969) paved the way for this independent spin on extreme pranking. Writer-director-producer James Ronald Whitney began his filmmaking career with JUST, MELVIN (2000), a documentary about his own family's miserable history of child abuse that feels a little too lurid for its own good intentions. This feature-length provocation chronicles the first round of "America's Most Uninhibited Game," which Whitney concocted and orchestrates with smarmy glee. Six contestants, handpicked from a grueling audition at which they must confess deep emotional traumas and improvise explicit sex scenes, are placed in a series of embarrassing situations, directed to accomplish certain goals and given points based on how well they fulfill their assignments. Over a 72-hour period, the three men and three women — Joshua Coleman, Scott Ryan, David Maynard, Sarah Smith, Dani Marco and Elisha Imani Wilson — must complete tasks that range from persuading complete strangers to give them a urine sample to seducing unsuspecting delivery boys. The most elaborate prank involves pairs of contestants coyly enticing a stranger to their hotel room for "a naked trio" only to reveal that what they meant was that the three of them were going to do a hokey nude song-and-dance number. Between rounds they're questioned by the game's judges, mediagenic therapist Gilda Carle and singer-comic Jim Caruso, who encourage them to pick at their deepest psychic scars until they bleed. Drawing blood takes very little picking, since the contestants have a lot of issues: compulsive-eating or sexual disorders, childhood abuse, parents lost under traumatic circumstances, part-time hustling... the range of dysfunction is breathtaking. Is this the ultimate sleazy reality project, a contrived and degrading spectacle or a biting satirical expose of the lengths to which people will go for fleeting fame? It's actually all of the above, and the twist ending proves that the attractive contestants have more going for them than sheer nerve. But explaining what they're doing well spoils the ending as surely as shouting "Bruce Willis doesn't know he's a ghost!" at someone who hasn't seen THE SIXTH SENSE (1999), and you have to put up with a lot of grubby stuff for the payoff. There's no denying the freak-show appeal and you don't see frontal nudity like this on TV, but otherwise it's all as contrived and artificial as Survivor. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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