Desperation makes people do stupid, yet hilarious things, and writer-director Greg Joyce built an entire movie around that idea. Working Stiff takes a guy who’s never taken a real risk in his life and drops him into the last place he belongs—armed with a camera and about to make a porno.
Gene Meserve’s (Sean Vincent Biggins) life is on the brink of disaster. He works a go-nowhere job making training videos for the sprawling corporate conglomerate that employs him. To make matters worse, after the death of his loving elderly landlord, her son shows up demanding that Gene catch up on months of his back mortgage payments or be evicted. Gene needs $10,000 fast. Desperate for cash, he goes to his boss, Mike Kelly (John P. Arnold), who offers him the money if he can complete a three-month video project in just one month. When Gene does it, his boss screws him on the deal.
Frustrated to no end at work and desperate for the cash, Gene does the one thing he doesn’t want to do: make an adult film for a group of dentists who will pay him the $10,000 he needs to save his home. As luck would have it, Gene’s next project at the company is to produce a corporate video on workplace sexual harassment. Gene gets the bright idea to take the script, written by company sexual harassment consultant Paula Rector (Michele Markarian), and turn it into a porno. He essentially makes two movies at once: a corporate video during the day and a porno at night.
Helping him out are his easy-going cinematographer, Buddy DiMarco (Paul D’Amato), who’s more than up for the task, and his co-worker and secret crush, Margaret Sass (Maia Tamanakis), who catches him researching pornos and offers to give him the help he needs. Now all he needs are actors just good enough to act in a corporate training video and willing to have sex on film at night. Much-needed help comes from retired adult film star Fairly Gorgeous (Leslie Lang), who offers to show him the ropes in making a porno. What could go wrong?
“Gene gets the bright idea to take the script…and turn it into a porno.”
Director Joyce made the film more than twenty-five years ago, financing it mostly with credit cards and whatever savings he could drain. Production actually shut down halfway through when the money ran out, and it took a full year for him to regroup and finish shooting. Now he’s had it digitized and remastered, betting that streaming can finally get Working Stiff in front of the audience it deserved all along.
Working Stiff is a reminder of just how much fun independent filmmaking used to be back in the late ’90s and early 2000s. Shot on film, the picture carries this soft, grainy look you just don’t see anymore, and the plot is completely outlandish, but felt weirdly normal in the ’90s.
Writer-director Greg Joyce clearly clocked the corporate sexual harassment training video boom of the era and found a connection between that boom and adult films—a premise rife with comedic situations—and Working Stiff is packed with jokes as a result. The film never gets anywhere close to actually being adult, but is titillating enough to cross that sexy threshold. What really works here is Gene, our naive, awkward hero with his heart and eyes locked on one woman. He gets shoved into a situation that’s clearly over his head, but deep down, he’s got the talent, the ability, and the drive to actually pull it off. Sean Vincent Biggins is the perfect choice for Gene. The whole film is low-budget, no doubt about it, but like a lot of movies coming out of the ’90s, the storyline—weird as it is—has a heart of gold. Though if I were writing the script, I would have walked as close to the line of decency as humanly and ratings-board possible. In other words, I really wanted to use the word “raunchy” in this review, but I can’t. Despite this small qualm, Working Stiff will make you yearn for the days when films got made this way.
For screening information, visit the Working Stiff official website.
"…Sean Vincent Biggins is the perfect choice..."
