Alex Phillips delivers a sleazy, queasy, strangely sincere serial-killer sex-work comedy, where the gig economy hoes have to stick together as the bodies pile up.
Anything The Moves is a serial-killer sex-worker comedy that shifts from sleazy to sincere without ever losing its edge. Writer/director/editor Alex Phillips’s follow up to his wild oddity All Jacked Up And Full Of Worms rolls through Chicago’s margins on two bicycle wheels and a steady supply of bad decisions. It follows Liam (Hal Baum), an app-based supplier of erotic services, for whom the gig economy is the gigalo economy. But when his clients start turning up dead, with dollar bills stuffed into their smashed skulls, police suspicion of Liam mounts – and so does the pressure to stay ahead of whatever’s closing in.
Anything That Moves’s homage to 1970s erotic thrillers is clear, both in the casting of vintage porn icons like Nina Hartley and Ginger Lynn, and in the pulsing synthetic score by Chicago’s Cue Shop. Shot on grainy 16mm, the film is steeped in the language of queer grindhouse provocations and late-night cable trash. But it never condescends, and beneath the blood and grotesque punchlines there’s genuine affection for its characters, who are rarely granted this kind of narrative centrality. The tone lurches from outrageous to oddly touching: sometimes the gags fall flat, but the performances stay strong and Phillips’s commitment to his vision never wavers.
Newcomer Jiana Nicole is wonderfully droll as Liam’s girlfriend and colleague, and the film’s gang of supporting characters are a collection of lovingly sketched grotesques. But they are each afforded a sense of humanity – even the hilariously, ludicrously antagonistic homicide cops. A messy bartender also gives good comedic value.
In fact, there’s plenty to enjoy in taking Anything That Moves as an anything-goes hangout movie, that just happens to have wildly brutal murders happening just out of frame. But its final stretch is where things really clicked for me – not so much because of the solution to the mystery, but because the film shows faith in the bonds between people who’ve lived on the defensive for too long. Long after the details of who the killer was, and why, have faded from memory, I’ll remember Anything That Moves’s charming vision of ’ho solidarity.
This movie knows how absurd survival can look from the outside—but it never treats it as a joke. In Phillips’s world there may be a thick layer of sleaze on the surface, but the camaraderie runs deeper. For that, I recommend it.
Anything That Moves played at the Fantasia International Film Festival
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