Movie Blog Post: HOW TO PLAN AN ORGY IN A SMALL TOWN

Awkward Sex Abounds in Comedy
“How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town”

By Tinsel & Tine Editor, Le Anne Lindsay

I could picture How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town as a Christopher Guest movie, with the addition of Eugene Levy and Fred Willard to this nutty mix of small town neighbors, friends and ex’s determined to have a night of unabashed sex – Orgy style.How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town is actually written and directed by Jeremy LaLonde, who was raised in a small town and had planned to do a movie with that as the focus, but found himself wondering one day how does an orgy actually happen in real life – from getting the people together to the rules – the two ideas met – orgy + small town = HTPAO.

T&T Short Synopsis: Most people’s first time is hardly the stuff of romantic novels, but poor Cassie Cranston (Zoe Cleland /Jewel Staite) gets mortified when she and her boyfriend Adam (Alex Harrouch /Ennis Esmer) get caught trying to have sex during a high school party at Heather Mitchell’s (Lauren Lee Smith) house. Adam runs into the bathroom and locks the door, leaving Cassie on the other side without her clothes and at the mercy of the other kid’s teasing, taunting and shaming. Cassie is forced to make her way downstairs through the entire party in her bra and panties and out the door to nearly streak home, where she’s met by her mother on the porch who shows no mercy or compassion, just disgust and anger that Cassie’s actions would reflect badly on herself in the town’s eyes.

Fast forward a decade or so and Cassie has become a Carrie Bradshaw type Sex Columnist in NYC and hasn’t returned to her small hometown of Beaver’s Ridge since graduating High School. It’s only the death of her mother that brings Cassie back, where she discovers Adam has married the supercilious Heather Mitchell, who in her determination to show Cassie that Beaver Ridge is far from narrow-minded, invites Cassie to oversee a town orgy.

At face value, the concept is an outlandish one, but it also has an emotional core. The film is not just a sex comedy explains Jewel Staite, who plays the lead Cassie Cranston, “When I read the script I was laughing by page three, and then it got sweet and heart warming.

Ennis Esmer, who plays Adam, saw huge potential for the story to be the perfect balance of humor and heart. He noted it wasn’t hard to imagine what kind of emotions, reactions and funny moments that would come out of the situation, “The film addresses the question: what would
you do if you were in a situation where you were watching someone you’re in a relationship with being intimate with someone you’ve known from high school?

Jonas Chernick, who plays Chester and who is also the star-writer-producer of My Awkward Sexual Adventure, knew the script was good when he read it, commenting “When I read the script I was jealous because Jeremy just wrote the best Canadian sex comedy ever! – Production Notes

HTPAO will screen in Philly at the PFS Roxy Theater (20th & Sansom) starting Friday, May 13, 2016.

I watched the movie from a screener sent to me by a PR agency who I think found T&T via SEO, partly because I do include a lot of the Film Society’s events in my social media, but mainly because I’ve notice a lot of traffic for my post on Laura Eason play Sex with Strangers, and an old post from 2014 Lars von Trier’s Nymphomaniac both Volumes 1 & 2. Wouldn’t it be hilarious after all this time trying to figure out whether or not to limit the scope of films & movies I write about on Tinsel & Tine, that my niche could start to be a site about movies, films & plays with sexual themes! No porn, of course, other than food porn hmmm….

Bottom Line: How to Plan an Orgy in a Small Town is definitely an amusing flick, but I was surprised to find out it’s 40% comedy and 60% soft porn. I figured the title was a great device to grab an audience’s attention, but that the movie would hardly be about an actual orgy, but it’s really about a series of awkward, terribly executed, floundering, miss-matched sexual encounters taking place between people who in the light of day still have to see each other in the grocery store, at work, and possibly at church the next morning, which I think would have been a funny scene to include.

Even if you don’t live in a small town like Beaver Ridge, think about the associations and organizations you’re a part of and how crazy it would be to have group sex with members of said microcosms. Think about the varying personalities, body shapes and sizes, and then think about each person’s cum face. It’s both a horrifying and fascinating thought.

Supporting Cast: Kristian Brunn, James McGowan, Tommie-Amber Pirie, Jonas Chernick, Mark O’brien, Katharine Isabelle

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