The virtues here are mainly in the fantastic subject matter - Dan Sonney and David Friedman, devoted family men (well sort of) and pioneering purveyors of the lower forms of cinematic sleaze. Not the very lowest - maybe I'm wearing rose-tinted nostalgia glasses, but the clips from their nudie-cuties and gorefests look great about eighty percent of the time, just drenched in Kodachrome, suggesting lost worlds with their cavorting volleyball nudism. Then, oh well, they get bored and start beating up/dismembering the gals. Now they've got age eighty surrounded, the businessman and the carny, and they play well-rehearsed shtick off each other like the pros that they are. Bonnitt straddles affection and cagey ambivalence pretty smartly, and one can only admire how he follows in his subjects' footsteps with his stubborn independence in the new age of digital distribution. On the other hand, one is hard pressed to admire his skill at putting a movie together; the movie is one-quarter gone before Friedman gets a character sketch, the worthy conceit of showing these old sleazebags in their suburban still lives is milked to the point of raw pointless tedium, and having ONE big-name sycophant (Frank Henenlotter?!) on board to fill in the gaps isn't really much of a challenge to the talk-doc paradigm. Very likable, but less than the sum of its fascinating parts.
