It’s hard to imagine that the title didn’t deter people from seeing the film. Just imagine talking to a significant other or a group of friends and suggesting that you should all “check out A Good Old Fashioned Orgy.” Perhaps you could strengthen your chances of being called a deviant if you inform you parents that you spend you Friday night “watching A Good Old Fashioned Orgy.” The totally abysmal – and almost incredible – box office haul (around $200,000) is more indicative of American squeamishness and unwillingness to admit an intrigue with perversion that it is of the content of the film.
Truth be told, the story is rather predictable as are the characters’ experiences with insecurities, affirmations, drunkenness, and sex (lots of sex), but it isn’t nearly as riddled with corny euphemisms and foreseeable innuendo as the title might suggest. There are no plays on the word “Johnson”; “come” is used as its socially acceptable definition; there are no misunderstood conversations that result in awkwardness.
Rather, A Good Old Fashioned Orgy finds three thirtysomethings mourning the imminent loss of their party pad – Eric’s (Jason Sudeikis) father’s (Don Johnson) beach house in the Hamptons. While Eric’s father is off philandering with anything that moves, his property is routinely taken over by his son and his son’s band of rather dysfunctional friends. (Here, we have the typical cadre of characters: the inhibited, the hypochondriac, the artist, the loser, the snob, and the pseudo-intellectual.)
Each party they throw has a theme (Oktoberfest in July, The White Trash Bash, Orgy), and each party ends with blackouts and hangovers. At the start, I was expecting a rendition of Old School, but Orgy is different. Old School is about adults trapped in adult lives despite their efforts of trying to relive their youth.
Orgy elides the commentary on constrictive society (for the most part) and provides us with self-entitled juveniles who have never really grown up. Eric leaves meetings early (by rolling out of board rooms on his desk chair), Mike (Tyler Labine) is unemployed, unattractive, and single (a less funny version of The Hangover’s Allan), Doug (Martin Starr) is a lawyer who spends most of his time trying to be a rockstar, and the women – well, I’m not sure what they do save Alison (Lake Bell), who has an Master’s in something or other, which gives her permission to deliver variations of advice in her “expert opinion.” Regardless, she spouts rhetoric but follows none of it.
What’s more, I’m not sure we can even champion Eric – who is by far the main character, or lead wolf (to steal another bit from The Hangover – in that he’s a thirty something year old child. The house he laments losing is not his; and his offer to help pay utilities is conciliatory at best.
But for some reason, I like this film. It’s not great, but it’s adequate and re-watchable. The characters’ interactions are believable: from the attraction to the hesitation to the discomfort to the morning after. The funny moments seem to happen organically, and even the love interest conjured between Eric and Kelly (Leslie Bibb) feel earnest. Many times I expected the story to follow a cliched path of conflict and reconciliation, but, for the most part, it stay on track, balancing discomfort, confusion, and entertainment.
There’s also something to be said for the a film that acknowledges the hedonistic side of human nature without mocking it as pure spectacle. Films like Piranha, its sequel and its inevitable other sequels that do this. Even the subsequent American Pies sold out the profound exploration of sex, love, and the youth misinterpretation of both in the first one to skin-flick crudity. Orgy doesn’t do this either. The times that genitals could have been flashed to keep the audience interested and weren’t far exceeds the times that bare breasts or a shriveled penis make and appearance.
When Eric and Mike venture into Paradiso (an underground sex club located in the back room of a mattress store) sex is treated as casually in the club as it is portrayed on the screen. And, in a sense, I think this is what directors Alex Gregory and Peter Huyck were going for. If it wasn’t they could have loaded the screen with breasts, butts, and johnsons for the majority of 100 minutes.
