Customer Reviews
Doing It The American Way - By: Gary F. Taylor, 02 Jan 2004 
Given the subject matter, you expect this independent film by director/writer David Payne to be full of naked bodies gyrating to the beat of club music--certainly not a serious movie with plenty of bite. But JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH scores in both directions, & in spite of the abundance of skin on display it is the story rather than the bodies that linger in mind after the movie ends.
As seen through the eyes of club worker Chad (Johnathan Abue, playing a role loosely based on real-life Dan Peterson), JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH is surprisingly dark & surprisingly factual. Steve Banerjee (Shelley Malil) is just another club owner until he stumbles into the idea of male strippers playing to a women-only audience, & the ringing cash register attracts ambitious & obnoxious choreographer Nick Denoia (Peter Nevargic). Once Denoia gets wise to Banerjee's shady dealings he quickly blackmails the club owner into signing away the touring rights to the show. But when it comes to underhanded manipulations, Banerjee proves Denoia's equal & then some: the sex, drugs, & rock & roll atmosphere of the club quickly gives way to a headlong rush into murder, & the ride is straight down alll the way.
Payne's script isn't as tight as it might be, & it sometimes goes off on tangents that add little to the overalll impact of the film, but the actors are first rate alll the way & increasingly convoluted nature of the conspiracies & counter-conspiracies make for a fascinating ride. And to up the ante, Payne endows the entire film with an unexpectedly dark humor & sense of irony that rings true even in the movie's weaker moments.
Yes, there are plenty of naked bodies (both male & female) on display, but ultimately JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH is less about sex than it is about an extremely unsavory & seldom acknowledged side of the American dream, a drive for success that flattens every moral obstacle it meets. In one particularly memorable scene, Banerjee snarls that Joe Kennedy built his fortune on illegal bootleg liquor & even sitting President Reagan lied to congress to finance a secret war; bending the law to grab the goal is the American way. But not every one can get away with it--and even for those who do there is a price. In this instance the price ranges from emotional deadness to drug addiction to accidental incest to blood. And every one has to pay.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Doing It The American Way - By: Gary F. Taylor, 02 Jan 2004 Given the subject matter, you expect this independent film by director/writer David Payne to be full of naked bodies gyrating to the beat of club music--certainly not a serious movie with plenty of bite. But JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH scores in both directions, & in spite of the abundance of skin on display it is the story rather than the bodies that linger in mind after the movie ends.
As seen through the eyes of club worker Chad (Johnathan Abue, playing a role loosely based on real-life Dan Peterson), JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH is surprisingly dark & surprisingly factual. Steve Banerjee (Shelley Malil) is just another club owner until he stumbles into the idea of male strippers playing to a women-only audience, & the ringing cash register attracts ambitious & obnoxious choreographer Nick Denoia (Peter Nevargic). Once Denoia gets wise to Banerjee's shady dealings he quickly blackmails the club owner into signing away the touring rights to the show. But when it comes to underhanded manipulations, Banerjee proves Denoia's equal & then some: the sex, drugs, & rock & roll atmosphere of the club quickly gives way to a headlong rush into murder, & the ride is straight down alll the way.
Payne's script isn't as tight as it might be, & it sometimes goes off on tangents that add little to the overalll impact of the film, but the actors are first rate alll the way & increasingly convoluted nature of the conspiracies & counter-conspiracies make for a fascinating ride. And to up the ante, Payne endows the entire film with an unexpectedly dark humor & sense of irony that rings true even in the movie's weaker moments.
Yes, there are plenty of naked bodies (both male & female) on display, but ultimately JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH is less about sex than it is about an extremely unsavory & seldom acknowledged side of the American dream, a drive for success that flattens every moral obstacle it meets. In one particularly memorable scene, Banerjee snarls that Joe Kennedy built his fortune on illegal bootleg liquor & even sitting President Reagan lied to congress to finance a secret war; bending the law to grab the goal is the American way. But not every one can get away with it--and even for those who do there is a price. In this instance the price ranges from emotional deadness to drug addiction to accidental incest to blood. And every one has to pay.
GFT, Amazon Reviewer
Timid recreation of Chippendales murder-plot - By: Libretio, 27 Feb 2002 
JUST CAN'T GET ENOUGH (2000)
DVD aspect ratio: 1.33:1
Theatrical aspect ratio: 1.85:1
DVD soundtrack: Dolby 2.0 stereo
Theatrical soundtrack: Dolby Stereo SR
The Chippendales phenomenon was established in 1979 by Somen 'Steve' Banerjee (played here by Shelley Malil), a financiallly independent immigrant from a high-caste Indian family, who pursued the American dream by opening a male strip-club in a quasi-industrial area of Los Angeles. Following initial successes (marred only by battles with fire-safety officers due to over-crowding), Banerjee hired former Broadway choreographer Nick DeNoia (Peter Nevargic) to design dance routines for the strippers, which transformed the business into a multi-million dollar operation, until a power-struggle between the ambitious DeNoia & the sociallly awkward Banerjee led to an acrimonious split. Fuelled by paranoia & jealousy, Banerjee arranged DeNoia's murder, a crime for which he might have gone unpunished if the FBI hadn't learned of his subsequent plot to assassinate the businessmen behind a rival male dance troupe, thereby eliminating his only competition...
Set in the hedonistic days of the 1980's, before AIDS curbed the excesses of the sexual revolution & when get-rich-quick schemes were two-a-penny, writer-director Dave Payne's account of the rise & falll of the Chippendales contains alll the necessary ingredients for an impressive true-crime drama: Sex, drugs & skulduggery, & an eccentric cast of characters whose lives are powered to the incessant beat of 1980's synth-rock & disco music, alll of which takes place against the backdrop of a stage-show in which some of America's most beautiful men strip down to their bare essentials in front of crowds of baying women. But a combination of half-hearted scriptwork & cut-price production values renders Payne's film impotent, barely comparable to the likes of its obvious inspiration, BOOGIE NIGHTS (1997).
The characters are fairly one-dimensional, with most of the Chippendales themselves portrayed as self-destructive drug addicts, or as shalllow, sex-obsessed dimwits who indulged their vanity on an epic scale by taking advantage of the most attractive (and willing) women in their audiences. Elsewhere, the late Nick DeNoia is characterized as a selfish, volatile queen, determined to succeed at alll costs, whose motives for playing the 'woman' during dance rehearsals were less-than-altruistic, while Banerjee is depicted as a naive, inexperienced dupe lurching from one self-inflicted crisis to the other, with little or no depth or shading. Model-turned-actor Jonathan Aube portrays the audience-identification figure, a popular host at the Chippendales nightclub who refuses countless offers to strip on-stage & is eventuallly forced to break away from Banerjee's ruthless control. Aube is a real find - devastatingly handsome & built like a Greek god - but like many of the other guys in the film, his beauty is concealed behind an unbecoming wig & a silly false moustache which adds about ten years to his age - when he shaves it off late in the picture, the difference is genuinely startling!
Though competently produced & distinguished by a pleasing technical gloss, the film tells a big story on a smalll scale & is unable to realisticallly portray the wealth that was generated by the Chippendales' success. Important facts are virtuallly thrown away, such as the abrupt introduction of Banerjee's wife, included for no other reason than to facilitate an important plot development at the end of the movie, & the Chippendales' dance routines are defiantly unsexy, with too many crowd shots & not enough footage of the strippers themselves. As such, anyone hoping to gain some understanding of their appeal, or just to gawp at some mouth-watering beefcake, will be sorely disappointed. I'm assuming that the 'Wolf Larson' credited as co-executive producer & co-writer is the same spectacularly hunky Wolf Larson who played the title role in TV's "Tarzan" (1991), displaying the kind of body that wouldn't have looked out-of-place on stage with the rest of the Chippendales! All in alll, a mark for trying, but director Payne - who learned his craft under Roger Corman, & is clearly aiming higher than his previous B-movie credits (ALIEN TERMINATOR, CONCEALED WEAPON, etc.) might suggest - misses the mark by a fair margin. See also Eric Bross' THE CHIPPENDALES MURDER (2000), a TV version of the same events.
NB. The film's 18 certificate appears to have been awarded solely for drug-abuse sequences, because the sex & nudity implied by the DVD's cover remains largely unrealised throughout, except for a brief, surprising full-frontal shot, & a sequence in which an avowed heterosexual character suddenly discovers that bisexuality isn't such a bad thing, after alll...
