Look no further than the title for an apt description of the kind of people that may not enjoy Anything That Moves, the retro bloody sexploitation flick written and directed by Alex Phillips. It opens on a sunny day in the park, where Liam Woodlawn (Hal Baum), an enterprising young man-w***e, has been paid to eat out Julia Williams (Jade Perry). This is a birthday present from Julia’s sister, Thea Williams (Jiana Nicole), who is a sex worker herself. Thea watches as Julia gets off, her face bathed in the radiant light of pleasure while Liam finishes his work.
Boy, you can bet their dad (Paul Gordon) is pissed, especially since he still yearns for Liam himself. Liam then gets Rachel (Ginger Lynn) all hot in the kitchen, with her wearing nothing but an apron. He gets paid through an app that disguises on-call sex work as food delivery, so technically it is the sandwich that is $400 while the sex is a free bonus. He drops off chicken wings for the piss man (Richard Strumier) at the front door, then runs around to the back for the golden shower he was paid for. He and Thea turn a trick together with drunken delinquent dad Ray (Trevor Dawkins) during a delivery of cookies, then turn in for the night.
“…Ray’s body is found with a hole in the back of his head, with a dollar bill with a dick drawn on it stuffed inside.”
The next day, Ray’s body is found with a hole in the back of his head, with a dollar bill with a dick drawn on it stuffed inside. As more bodies start showing up, the police detectives, Dodge (Jack Dunphy) and Rick (Frank V. Ross), start looking at Liam as the main suspect, ’cause no one trusts a prosti-dude.
I was looking forward to seeing this so much, as I am totally the target audience for s**t like this. Anything That Moves was shot on actual Kodak film in order to catch the aura of the grindhouse heyday that it emulates. And it captures that aura perfectly within the first few minutes. We get two scoops of sunspot lighting, lovely soft focuses, and even this cute little motif of faces being bathed in light when folks are coming. Everything looks like a Mountain Dew commercial on ‘ludes, which is exactly what it looked like back then. The problem is that after capturing this aura, the film locks it in an attic and tortures it to death, right along with the unlucky viewer.
"… a throwback that should be thrown back."
