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(More customer reviews)Five teen boys from an Eastern suburb enjoy a kegger at Maximo's parents' place, inviting the hottest chicks in town sometime in the 1980s. Twenty years later, most of the clique has gotten married and settled down, but they still blow off steam once a year during a big city weekend getaway. This year it's Philadelphia, ostensibly for an Eagles game, but for a few of the now grown men it's their chance to cheat on their wives and live it up and do cocaine without worrying about the consequences. They're all still boys at heart and the movie makes that clear once every thirty-five or forty seconds.
They each have different personalities, though the movie is underwritten as to what the personalities are, and the actors apparently have a lot of room to ham it up in the best Cassavetes style ("Husbands" anyone?), so you get the impression one is secretly a coward, another a sex addict, a third one probably a closet case, while Max is really trying to grow up, and the last guy (Nick) is the one who was raised by alcoholics so his personality has been deformed in some unclear way, but he's a cheater.
What they don't know (or most of them don't know) is that this year their group has been targeted by a David Lynch-like crew of pornographers who plan to kidnap and sexually molest the best looking of them. Led by a creepy old man (Robert Blake in LOST HIGHWAY, anyone?) this film crew locks up Nick and Jason in the eponymous "playroom" and proceed to make them into chemslaves, keeping them chained to their beds with only a single sheet between them and strap-on horrors they could not previously have imagined. The two actors do grand work looking like they've been put through hell, in a scene that goes back and forth with rapid cuts to a nightclub where the un-kidnapped members of the Five are watching a female stripper with rapt amusement. I get the impression the director is saying, porn is great while you're watching it, but when you're forced to bend over a jungle gym and be filmed with a electrified and sparking club inserted deep into your rectum, it's not that funny, is it, funny boy? These scenes are filmed in the most grim INLAND EMPIRE way, with the suspense being mostly about, will they be saved before they are snuffed out on video? How will we know?
One of the mad old man's lead actresses is a hooker to whom Max, the hero, had been inexplicably kind years ago, saving her from a beating at the hands of a john she had cheated. Years later, after the hardening of her human instincts and five years more on the street, has that spark of humanity been crushed in her, or will she risk her own life to give Max a helping hand when he needs it? The boys all have wives and kids back at home in suburbia. . who will return? Who will become addicted to the snuff lifestyle? This movie has two clever twists, and doesn't need them, how's that? Otherwise DELIVERANCE did it rather better, except these guys have the kind of body John Travolta had in the SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER sequel, STAYING ALIVE, directed by Sylvester Stallone.
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