Director: David Beaird
Writer: David Beaird
From: Cult Cinema
A woman is hired to be a chauffeur despite the other drivers’ objections. While her freewheeling attitude irks her employer, it wins her the admiration, and maybe even love, of her customers.
A Marimark Production so I was coming into this one angry. And it’s all right. It’s all right for an 80’s film. The jokes that don’t age badly—like the homophobia of her first client—land well and the pacing is pretty good throughout.
So the rich and elderly Mr. Witherspoon has a message delivered to Casey Meadows, our heroine, telling her to report to Witherspoon’s limo service the next morning for work. She arrives, looking very Cyndi Lauper, while the boss is giving a speech to the aging male drivers about how it’s their job to keep the forces of modernism and hedonism at bay. Timing *whomp whomp*
The slobs vs. snobs set-up is already laid out and really when the movie’s at its best. Boss gives her unpleasant assignments, she handles them in unexpected ways, and if the movie had just followed that path of her as a driver with various comic set pieces and her co-workers coming around to respect her, I’d have liked it more. In fact, my favorite scene is pretty much a throwaway sequence in that context that doesn’t impact the plot at all.
Casey is at a hot dog stand at the end of her shift and overhears a couple arguing. The girl is chewing the guy out for not having a car. We learn, through the dressing down, that they're supposed to be going to a classy party, he works as a janitor at a school, and he’s taking night classes on his way to being a lawyer. Casey comes up with the Rolls Royce and says she’s his driver, apologizing for being late. The scene never comes up again and it’s an obvious one for this kind of plot, but it has heart and, more than any other scene, reveals the core of Casey’s character. Otherwise she’s generally a bit manic and mugging for comedy.
However, that’s not the plot of the movie. Casey is hired to drive the boss’ business-obsessed asshole banker son to wine country. The car breaks down, they have to walk a long way while bickering, and end up hooking up that night. That transition to them making out doesn’t work because there’s been no chemistry between them, but whatever. The movie wants to be this movie.
The next morning, he asks her to marry him and she says “no” because she doesn’t know his name. They go back and forth over this for the rest of the movie with him not revealing his identity till the end. When dad finds out, he gets very nervous as did I because now the specter of incest is hanging over this picture.
Then Penn & Teller show up. Yes. That Penn & Teller. Teller is playing a Saudi ambassador (*sigh* why?) and Penn is a grifter who sneaks into the limo and takes Teller out for a night on the town. He gets all of Teller’s money, takes both him and Casey clubbing, and pays a few women to fool around with Teller in the limo. Teller gets dropped off back at his hotel and Penn sneaks away.
The scene doesn’t work because we’re not seeing Penn doing the interesting sleight-of-hand that the duo is known for and the whole sequence just runs kind of long. It couldn’t be cut, though, because Casey gets fired the next morning for “kidnapping the ambassador.” Asshole banker, who has become a much kinder boss to his employees in the interim, finds her and takes her to meet dad.
Dad reveals that she grew up in the house because she’s the daughter of his former housemaid. And that he’s her father.
There it is, there’s that incest.
The couple gets giddy over this with a, “we did something naughty” reaction, which is not the right reaction. However, the boss’ driver comes in with another driver that’s been particularly salty to Casey, and reveals that this driver is actually Casey’s father, not the boss. So it’s not incest and they can get married.
These revelations, by the way, come within a minute of each other in the last five minutes of the film.
Anyway, they get married, get in the limo, and Casey tells the driver to take them home. It’s her former boss from the limo company who says “Yes ma’am.” THE END
I could do without the incest and the love story in general. My big complaint with the love story is that the two don’t have any chemistry and there’s no transition from them bickering and blaming each other for being stranded to hooking up. I would have liked more comedic set pieces maybe culminating in some chauffeur’s challenge between her and one of the other drivers. I don’t know what that would look like, but it would have been more fun.
The movie is passably fun as it is, though, and I have to give it credit for that. The music is a little weak, which seems like an odd thing to note, but it reminded me how I would honestly buy a compilation of the soundtracks from these Marimark films. As much as I hate the movies, the songs are uniformly solid and catchy. The songs, frankly, even the title songs, sound like they have more effort and craft put into them than the movies they’re in. This flick, though, was the outlier. I found myself forgetting the songs as they were playing. Maybe it’s the fact that this movie legitimately felt like a movie and is a good time so the songs had a higher bar to warrant my attention. I’d say it’s a recommend.
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