Club Utopia

Clearly the majority of the people that rated this are friends of the cast. The movie is sorta funny but odd and not very true to life, got board half way through.

I have acted in some films that turned out to be disappointing when I saw them on the big screen. When I was offered the role of Cisco in Club Utopia I was immediately interested because I had already had a very pleasant experience working with the Director/Producer, Frank Caruso. When I read the script, I was doubly interested, and when we discussed the project and I learned who would be in the cast and crew, I was confident that I was signing on to a quality film project. In the end, when I viewed the final version of the film, I was very, very happy. We had made a film that I can be proud to recommend to anyone who enjoys a good, fun, fast moving comedy.

Sally Enitlav is an under-appreciated housewife looking to at least get a part-time job while her husband Alex is preoccupied with stock trading and talking in his sleep about someone from the office named Gretchen DeSanto. Some of his heavy dreams end with screams that wake him up and Sally believes it is guilt. Sally applies for what she expects to be a waitress position at Club Utopia only to discover what they want is a dancer. Embarrassed as she is, she goes through the motions of getting a burlesque license and learning that a client paying for a table dance actually expects her to take off some clothes. Alex begins to sense that Sally is being secretive about something, so he hires a private detective Richard Sabatini to follow her with help from a door to door perfume salesman calling himself Mr. Cologne. Involving Sabatini puts his own life in the cross-hairs of cameras and exposes him to blackmail over the relationship with Gretchen. Events escalate until Sally is ready to team up with Sabatini and turn the tables on Alex and putting his life comically in danger as his hidden assassin may have to reach around from hiding under a bed and attempt to jab a hypodermic into a buttock that is moving around while he entertains a female guest. Shiraz Tayyeb, the new actor playing Cologne, has a natural presence, and the club DJ Trevor Annon seems right at home. Brett Halsey has a grounded and understated authority with inherent humour as the owner of Club Utopia. Full disclosure: I was involved with the script for a couple of years in the Nineties and a few bits I was responsible for maybe didn't belong by time this movie was made. For example, a Basic Instinct murder parody at the start made sense and was timely in 1992 the year Basic Instinct was released. Also, Alex asks the detective why he has a fan running on a cold day and he says, "Atmosphere." That made sense if it was a ceiling fan I indicated and if the office evoked Phillip Marlow and Sam Spade era detectives, but the production had instead gone for a small desk fan. Those kinds of issues might only be a distraction for me and might not throw the average viewer. As Alex, Srdjan Nikolic's Russian accent removes any subtlety of delivery but seems suited for the agitated state of the character for much of the movie. Sally as played by Elsie Muller is at her most believable when angry or fully crazy. She has a typical movie star look and an edge that makes the more vulnerable aspects of the character seem less accessible to her. Frank A. Caruso directing himself as Sabatini has a few moments where he seems to aware of the humour, and the performance is much better when he has to be either the improbable voice of sanity or conning his own cousin Mr. Cologne into doing the dirty work of their caper.

Wasn't expecting much but it turned out to be one of the funniest movies I've seen in a long time. The story is good and the actors are better. I know I laughed at least 20 different times. Thank you Amazon for streaming this movie. I enjoyed it from beginning to end, especially the scene where the guy was eating chicken under the bed. That was hilarious with a capital H.

This stinks worse than the dog crap the husband kept stepping in...been a lot of strip clubs since the 70's and never saw one this tame before....usually you can't see through the smoke and when you can its wall to wall naked women of all sorts...it would have worked better with an actress that could actually strip and do table dances...perhaps you might see criminal types hanging around but not conducting business on the premises...disguises like trench coats, shades and rumpled hats went out of style with the 30's hard boiled detective movies....i don't the writers of this script have a clue