"You have a nice penis."
"Thank you."
"You're my best friend."
"You're my best friend."
"I feel like I could tell you anything."
"Me, too."
"Tell me a secret. Tell me the weirdest thing you've ever done."
"I don't like this game."
The new and honestly adult comedy Sleeping Dogs Lie is dedicated to the proposition that, at least in the bedroom, honesty is never the best policy. First, let's get the spoiler out of the way so I can describe why you might actually enjoy this truly dark little comedy once you grasp what it's not about.
Amy (a droll impersonation of a desperate housewife in the making by newcomer Melinda Page Hamilton) gives into one of those truly inexplicable urges one very dull night early in her college career, and just up and blows her Great Dane, Rufus, then instantly regrets the doggone deed.
Flash-forward a few years, and Amy has snagged a very humpy but rather square boyfriend, John (Bryce Johnson), a cute, straight-arrow type who pushes Amy to confess some sexy transgression to raise the temperature of their foreplay. First Amy tells a white lie about bedding her buxom friend Linda (Morgan Murphy), but one fateful night, as Amy and John prepare to screw in the back seat of her parent's vintage VW convertible, the awful truth comes tumbling out faster than you can say, "Lips that have touched dog shall not touch mine."
Amy's world collapses. Losing the affections in one fell swoop of John and her prudish parents, and feeling betrayed by her malicious, speed-addled older brother Dougie (Jack Plotnick), Amy is left to pick up the pieces of her life by sleeping on Linda's couch while Linda and nerdy boyfriend engage in infantile sex-play at top volume in the next room. Linda gets closer to a friendly male teacher, Ed (Colby French), at her elementary school.
It's just when you've recovered from a blizzard of canine, sex and drug jokes that Sleeping Dogs dares to flash its unexpectedly sweet side. Sweet is an odd word to employ when describing the fevered imagination of Dog's writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait. For the past couple of decades, Goldthwait has been TV comedy's Evil Knievel, willing to perform the most outlandish stunts in search of a laugh: a continuing role in the low-brow franchise comedy hit Police Academy; a Today show interview that left Katie Couric practically foaming at the mouth; the spontaneous impulse to set Jay Leno's couch ablaze on the Tonight show; the 1992 edgy comedy Shakes the Clown, either a daring exercise in black humor about the underbelly of American show business or a scatological tornado of offensive gags.
Satiric service
Only one character, the vengeful, drug-addled brother Dougie, can be described as a refugee from the Shakes school of scorched-earth comedy. The rest of the cast — Geoffrey Pierson's control-freak suburban dad, Bonita Friedericy's seemingly prudish mom hiding a history of rock-and-roll excess, Bryce Johnson's maliciously sexy rendering of the too-good-to-be-true boyfriend — give pitch-perfect satiric service to a director whose vision wobbles between take-no-prisoners Todd Solondz to the more layered screwball of David O. Russell.
Goldthwait's mission from the get-go seems to be a slyly subversive excursion to the underbelly of human erotic attachments, and a tentative answer to the eternal question of why even the most sophisticated amongst us can't reveal the source of our erotic pleasures without fearing the loss of all we hold dear.
The director includes slight bows to a queer sensibility: a horny straight woman disavows any lesbian leanings in the pursuit of a genuinely penis-centric happiness, and a chubby straight boy is candid enough to admit that guys might be less trouble than hiring a shrink to hang onto a wayward wife, if only he had a taste for dick.
Ignore the Internet buzz on this one, and appreciate a two-film director who reveals a taste that is morphing from Howard Stern to at least imitation Terry Zwigoff.