“How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town unfortunately settles for comically brazen and antagonistic sentiments”
How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town is very similar to last year’s forgotten comedy-drama The D Train in that it boasts an intriguing premise ripe for a great deal of contemporary commentary on relationships, yet it doesn’t particularly break new ground and laughs at its characters when it should be supporting them. You can’t simultaneously laugh at your characters’ social awkwardness and low self-esteem yet try to make the audience sympathetic to their cases.
The film opens with a sexual counter between teenagers Cassie (Jewel Staite) and Adam (Ennis Esmer) at a party, which goes horribly awry when Heather (Lauren Lee Smith), the host, finds them and ridicules Cassie for being a slut when they didn’t even have sex. Years from now, Cassie is a successful town columnist writing sociological studies and humanist thinkpieces about sex, despite being a virgin herself. She has distanced herself, and, in turn, become somewhat disgraced, in her small town of Beaver’s Ridge after publishing a scathing piece on its oppressive and regressive views on sexuality, largely brought to light when she had to run through most of the town in her bra and underwear following her awkward sexual encounter.
Upon hearing the news that her mother has passed, Cassie returns to Beaver’s Ridge. All of the people she went to school with still live in the town because that’s where they’re bound to live and die. Adam is now married to Heather and are desperately trying to have a baby in a romantically stunted relationship, while Cassie’s other girlfriend Alice (Katharine Isabelle) still clings to her side. Also in their clique is the nerdy Chester (Jonas Chernick) who works alongside Polly (Tommie Amber-Pirie) at a record store, the obnoxious Realtor Bruce (Mark O’Brien), and Bruce’s older colleague Spencer (James McGowan).
- How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town
- Directed by
Jeremy Lalonde - Cast
Jewel Staite, Lauren Holly, Katharine Isabelle - Release Date
22 January 2016 - Steve’s Grade: C-
One day, the gang of friends decide to sexually liberate themselves out of their repressed lives by having an orgy, with Cassie documenting the experience for her new book. The group of friends, all of them socially awkward and so incompetent one has a hard time believing they have the ability to coordinate a day let alone take part in a complicated sex act, wind up learning more about themselves and others as they each try to use the orgy to benefit themselves in different ways.
Its first and biggest issue is that it tries to make sex the punchline of the film. Time after time we’re forced to laugh at the faces these characters make when they have orgasms, the fact that Bruce takes erectile dysfunction pills, that Heather is a bit grossed out by sex, and at one point, there’s a pregnant neighbor who wants to join in the orgy to have the baby screwed out of her. Things like that lower the credibility of a film that had the potential to really provide underlying sweetness to its ostensibly crude and vulgar premise.
The film’s main showcase is its reliance on millennial awkwardness. It shows a generation raised in front of a TV and guided in the modern world by cell-phones, so when it comes time to be naked in the company of others, everyone looks for some sort of safety or easily read signal in how to proceed. Couple that with how generally incompetent and buffoonish these characters are and you have the recipe for a very half-baked sex farce.
To Lalonde and the performers’ credit, the film does make good use of every actor and actress’s charisma and ability to be lively screen presences. Lalonde’s script successfully brings out the best in Staite and Smith specifically, and provided me with some belly laughs that, while quickly forgotten, gave me a momentary diversion from a script that otherwise too heavily fixated itself on portraying the humor of awkward sexual encounters.
If absolutely nothing else, How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town proves that its title does result in a bloated twelve-step process. When one goes about having an orgy, who do they exactly contact? Having an orgy with several close friends could result in a lifetime of uncomfortable sentiments and doing so with strangers can be dangerous. Lalonde does a nice job at showing how complicated such a thing really is, however, winds up retracting to cheap humor when he presumably sees that the material could get heavy fairly quickly.
Rather than being a topical and insightful film about the sociology of group sex and the social anxiety of numerous individuals, How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town unfortunately settles for comically brazen and antagonistic sentiments when it could rise above instead of undercutting itself.
