Have Love, Will Travel 1 star
Tae Davies, Chandler Rylko, Roxanne Arvizu, Jarrod Crawford, Billy Gallo
Directed by Dan Peterson
Shows again June 12 at 4 p.m.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A girl walks into a hotel room. Some poor old sap of a man gives her his money. He thinks he’s getting sex, but she skillfully manipulates the situation to get the job done without even having to touch him. By the time he realizes what’s going on, she’s out the door.
Welcome to the world of private dancers, as seen from the inside. Have Love, Will Travel opens with this slick scam of a joke, and it’s funny, because we see how it works and because the guy really doesn’t deserve any better. But it doesn’t really set the mood for the rest of the film, which has humorous moments, but is mostly populated by depraved souls and scumbags around every corner.
The man behind this mischief is Dan Peterson, whose resume includes titles such as Vampire Knights and Girlfriend from Hell. He abandoned his film career for a time and ended up working as a driver and bodyguard for these call girls. He no doubt accumulated some entertaining stories in this line of work—a few of which get recounted in the movie—but they don’t add up to a meaningful feature film.
We meet Whitney and Nathan. She works as a waitress and is trying to go back to school. He wants to be an actor. Of course they both have bills to pay. We watch as they slowly get sucked into this seedy underground, each of them trying to justify their actions along the way.
For a while the film skates by, taking us behind the scenes and providing us with some genuinely interesting information about how this business works. But we know it will end badly, as it does for two acquaintances of Nathan’s who decide to do business with the wrong guy one night, at which point the film just becomes unpleasant.
The problem is that Peterson’s biggest insight is that money makes people do stupid things. Like Showgirls and Striptease, this is sleaze masquerading as morality play. We should know better than to fall for that trick.