Easy Sex (2002) from Johnny Web (Uncle Scoopy; Greg Wroblewski)

Aka Mustang Sally and Easy Six.

TOTAL SPOILERS

An odd little film. An unfulfilled English professor in a third-rate college (Princeton of Florida) will attend a Milton conference over the Christmas break. The conference is to be held in Vegas, because where else would you hold a discussion of serious literature? The professor's best friend, an athletic coach, has asked the lecturer to look up his estranged daughter while he's there.  After all, the professor was her favorite teacher.

He finds the girl, all right. In the novel she was working at the notorious Mustang Ranch (and her name is Sally, hence the title). The film has changed the name of the brothel, but the idea stays the same. She's a legal professional hooker. The professor is basically a man of scruples, and doesn't know how he will break the news to Sally's father. After a few successes at the tables and a few drinks, his moral code becomes considerably less rigid. He takes a car out to the ranch to have sex with the girl who is not only his former student but also his best friend's daughter. He not only has sex with her, but ends up falling for her, and they shack up for a couple of cozy nights.

Sally decides to call her dad and to come home for Christmas. That turns out to be a disaster because dad finds out about the affair, and the professor finds out that the daughter doesn't love him. The bottom line is that the professor is without a job, a girlfriend, or a best friend. That's only the beginning of his woes. The father becomes obsessed with the idea that the professor is the one who turned his sweet innocent daughter to prostitution in the first place. The old boy takes to heavy drinking while watching home movies of his happy daughter as a young girl. He gets so worked up that he buys a gun and decides to get some revenge.

The film was coherent up to that point, albeit with some strange and abrupt tone-shifts from comedy to tragedy, but the script sort of deteriorated at the end. The professor and the daughter ended up back in Vegas getting married by an Elvis impersonator. The father traveled to Vegas to kill the professor, but it turned out that he could only buy a pellet gun ("I can still put your eye out.") He causes enough of a scene to attract a Vegas cop, gets into a wrestling match with him, and ends up wandering around the strip brandishing a real police-issue gun. Well, it turns out that the Elvis impersonator is a Vietnam war hero. In fact he is John Rambo, master sniper, the very guy played in the movies by Stallone. Ol' Elvis/Rambo has finally had enough of the demented whining from the pussy father, so he simply takes out a high-powered rifle and blows the old fella away.

Hey, I told you it was an odd film.

You might call this a comedy, and there is a lot of silliness in it, especially from Jim Belushi as Elvis/Rambo, but if it is a comedy it is a very dark one, verging on Stygian blackness.

When the film ended, I was still unclear on a lot of points. For example:

• What was the strange enmity between father and daughter, and how did it get started? We can guess that it was some kind of incest, but a lot of the character motivation in the film hinges on knowing how this began, and how bad it is. Without  knowing those things, some of the the daughter's actions don't make sense.
• When the father caught up with them, the professor and the daughter were headed to the Vegas airport to catch a plane for their honeymoon in Hawaii. After the father is killed by Elvis/Rambo, we see them getting in separate cars and going separate ways. Why did they change their minds about spending a life together? I just didn't get it. (If I remember right, they were still together at the end of the novel.)
• Why were the father and the professor friends in the first place? These two men seemed to have absolutely nothing in common.

The film's auteur (Chris Iovenko) acted as editor in addition to writer and director, and had never performed any of those functions in a feature-length film before. That shows, especially in the clarity of the script. It's not a good enough film to recommend, but it has enough interesting elements to convince me that Iovenko should stay with this career.