Sex, Guaranteed (2017)

Student-made movies generally aren’t great, but that’s okay, because they’re not supposed to be: they’re an aspiring director’s attempt at telling a compelling story, sometimes with the help of an ambitious videographer who wants to try strange angles and zooms, or a budding sound mixer who wants to try his hand at weird sound effects and scores.

But then you get student movies where you have to assume that not only did the student director fail their course, but, based on how bad their creation was, presumably failed their entire degree too.

And to make matters worse: sometimes those movies make it out to the real world, where you find it and watch it and can’t turn it off because it’s a horrible train wreck and now you’re 30 minutes in and you’ve fallen to the sunk-cost fallacy.

That’s how we ended up watching “Sex, Guaranteed” (2017), which was released this decade, but somehow had all the trappings of 2010, including weird social mores, a plethora of flip-phones, and not a single MAGA hat.

First and foremost and incredibly distracting: the film crew clearly had two cameras, and only two cameras. I can say that with confidence because approximately 50% of the entire movie had a weird black dot in the middle of the screen that was just there. I thought it was lint at first, and then I was concerned that something was wrong with my TV, but no – there was long-term schmutz on the camera lens that somehow no one saw or corrected during the entire length of filming, editing, or post-production.

But beyond that: this was a waste of perfectly good celluloid followed Kevin (Grey Damon), the whiniest loser you ever did meet.
He was inexplicably convinced that his penis was cursed, and that any time he did anything with it, other people were harmed. He listed three entirely unconnected events – including the Space Shuttle Columbia’s explosion – as reasons to believe in the curse, while completely glossing over the fact that he was previously engaged to another human and clearly had sex with her repeatedly and nothing went wrong all those times.
His engagement fell apart at a stripclub during their joint bachelor/bachelorette party, because of course it did, and Kevin thus believed that the way back to his ex’s heart was celibacy… somehow.

Kevin’s path stumbled across Hank (Stephen Dorff), an unreasonably rich man with no backstory other than his own failed relationship, who decided it was his life’s new goal to get Kevin laid.
He could have opened an orphanage, or saved puppies, or given puppies to the children at orphanages, or literally anything else, but no. Somehow getting a random stranger some strange was the key.
Thus Hank introduced Kevin to Zade (Bella Dayne), a thousand-dollar-an-hour escort.

Zade had a German accent, which was never even slightly explained in the story, even when we met her very Louisiana parents, both of whom had regular southern accents and absolutely zero interest in explaining why their daughter clearly wasn’t one of them.
Zade’s father obviously didn’t know his daughter moonlit as an escort (her age was never clarified but it was shown that she lived at home), but made some deeply unsettling and inappropriate commentary about one of Zade’s friend’s body.
To Kevin.
Completely of his own volition.
In front of his wife and daughter.
I’m sure it was supposed to be funny, but for a movie released in 2017 and watched in 2021, it was definitely not.
It was about as much fun as the rape ‘jokes’ in “Animal House” (1978), but without the production-era context that provides a modicum of an excuse.

Somewhere in there, Hank found out that Kevin was celibate because he was saving himself for his ex, and thus Hank’s new life purpose shifted from ‘get Kevin laid’ to ‘get Kevin back together with his ex,’ because he believed in the power of Hollywood romance just… so much.
That lead to a lot of stupid little scenes of Kevin and Zade talking about relationship stuff – bearing striking resemblance to Yvaine’s comments on Tristan’s puppy-love for Victoria in “Stardust” (2007) – and getting to know each other and falling in love, all in the course of maybe 8 hours.
Ugh.
Most of those conversations included Kevin insulting Zade’s choice to make money from sex. Somewhere in there, there was an argument where Zade called Kevin a ‘parasite’ and Kevin called Zade a ‘tourist.’ Both of which were insulting in the moment, but somehow became pet-names by the finale, because everyone knows that a healthy relationship is based on marginally-offensive insults-turned-nicknames.

We also got a completely manufactured problem where Hank got himself arrested, because the director clearly wanted to give Kevin and Zade more time together but couldn’t figure out how to get Hank away, so putting him behind bars was their fix for approximately a third of the runtime was the magic key, only to get bailed out later, apparently for free.
You know, because bail works like that.

There was an entire B-plot about a guy named Carl (Dan Fogler), who was maybe Hank’s friend, but otherwise just existed and did weird drunk things at random points, only for the movie to end with him walking away in a bespoke suit and meeting up with his picture-perfect family.
Nothing says ‘comedy’ like subverting expectations for someone or something you didn’t care about!

Now, I’m not 100% sure this was a student movie, but based on the quality of the script and the actors and the plotline, I can only assume it was.
The camera work, however, was on-point, and I was repeatedly and pleasantly surprised at the smooth panning shots, stable dialog scenes, and general cinematic quality of the actual footage.
But again: the character development and everything else script related was a flaming bag of dog poop. Slick camera work cannot save this bloated corpse.

I said Kevin was a whiny loser at the top, but I cannot emphasize that point nearly enough.
Every single thing he said in this movie made me want to punch him and then kick him while he’s down.
His attitude toward sex in general, sex workers, relationships, the overall state of the world… all of it. Every line of script written for him was worse than the line before it.

Hank was apparently also a bit crazy, as he bought into Kevin’s ‘cursed penis’ premise.

Zade was the only highlight of this movie – as low a bar as that was – because she seemed to react to everything like a normal person would: calling Kevin an idiot repeatedly and insulting him.

Unfortunately, this movie ended with Kevin and Zade dating and Kevin’s inexplicable dream – a trampoline park business all his own – coming to fruition.
That just added to my theory that this movie was made many, many years ago, as Kevin had to convince people that a trampoline park was a worthy business model, while said parks are now common-place in mid-sized midwestern cities.
Unclear if Zade continued her work as an escort once dating Kevin, or if that was just a story she concocted because she was also an aspiring writer.

Please do yourself a favor: if you’re considering watching this movie, ask someone nearby to put on a stiletto high heel and step on your hand instead.
It earned itself a 1-Claw rating.