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The Worst Film Ever

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Rub and Tug (2002): Dir: Soo Lyu / Cast: Don McKellar, Tara Spencer Nairn, Cindy Booth, Kira Clavell, Susanne Sutchy: As the title indicates, this is a film about the forbidden or cheap thrills. It regards a massage parlor and the owner suspecting three female employees of foul play. Don McKellar is hired to catch these women using sexual conduct with clients. Apparently they can receive higher income at full service. Interesting plot falters with victimization. Director Soo Lyu avoids sexist elements and has fun with the location and the strange activities often associated with a job that defined what was legal and what wasn't. Tara Spencer Nairn plays the hardened experienced employee. Cindy Booth has a nipple pinching fetish. Her boyfriend is unaware of her true nature. Kira Clavell is hilarious as a Japanese female who must get married so that she and her family can stay in America. Finally there is McKellar, frustrated yet tries to uphold his dignity. Perhaps one of the flaws presented is that McKellar is placed as a villain when in fact his views on the situation are only proper. Theme regards victimizing of women through massage parlors. Whether it is appropriate to applaud these three women for their schemes is not the issue here. It presents an interesting location and risky occupation with humour that may rub viewers the right way. Score: 8 / 10

RUB & TUG writer\director Soo Lyu was not against nudity in her flick per se--witness Susanne Sutchy's boobishness in her bit part as the "new girl" April. However, though the three leads are constantly talking about taking off their tops, whenever they actually do the viewer is left with a bareback tease; that's it. In Soo Lyu's showing-it-like-it-is spirit, here's some suggestions for other projects dying to be made: 1)ALMOST SAVING PRIVATE RYAN--A crack rescue team storms Normandy Beach on D-Day to save the lone surviving son from a quartet of brothers. But when they notice there's no blood anywhere, they decide to throw back a few brews with Papa Hemingway in Paris instead. 2)THE BAAING OF THE LAMBS--A farm girl joins the FBI after watching every episode of X-FILES seven times. But the crime rate has fallen so low under the new administration that the highlight of her first five years is a case of sheep rustling. She quits the bureau to research gene modification, in a quest to equip ewes with better self-defense mechanisms. 3)BREATH OF A SALESMAN--The economy is in the pits, millions are out of a job, and even working girls cannot afford pricey lingerie. Brassiere salesman Hoot Erst hasn't made his sales goal in five years, and suddenly realizes his family's last asset is his life insurance policy. But while he's in the hardware store buying a hose to run his exhaust into his car, scrappers steal his catalytic converter. He ends up back at square one. If these projects strike you as safe but boring, you're ready to enroll in the Soo Lyu School of Film-making.

I'm afraid this one is pretty dreadful, despite several good performances and generally competent acting-for-the-camera direction. It's a first and last attempt by writer-director Soo Lyu. "Rub and Tug" (2002) is one of the unfortunate by-products of Canada's program to promote home-grown film-making. While the program encourages worthwhile efforts like "New Waterford Girl" it opens the door for untalented novices like Lyu who did not have to aggressively pitch this project but was green-lighted without an adequate examination of her script or her credentials. You don't mind the low budget because the shabby production design, bad lighting, poor audio, and dreary docu-style shot selection is consistent with the subject matter; the workers in Canadian massage parlors. But the dialogue and the plotting doesn't give the actors anything to work with, the editor much to assemble, or a viewer any mental challenge other than suspension of disbelief. When your story is this simplistic the last thing you need is a muddled storytelling technique; even though nothing happens, the movie is hard to follow and point-of-view impossible to pin down. Don McKellar's performance as Conrad is several notches below his similar characterization in "Exotica". Lindy Booth's Lea is her standard quirky airhead; as always she is likable but here she is little else. Kira Clavell's Cindy is a pleasant surprise, a kind of Asian Shelley Duval. The only other role of any consequence, Tara Spencer-Nairn's street-wise Betty, more than cancels out her excellent performance in "New Waterford Girl". Her shallow performance in "Rub and Tug" should curtail any tendency to seek out other films in which she has appeared; unless you need further confirmation of "Waterford" director Alan Moyle's skill in working with young actors. You quickly conclude that Lyu's reptilian brain cannot grasp concepts like plot complexity, so the need to insert a lazy and lame "deus ex machina" device toward the end is hardly a surprise. Still it could be worse, the listless story has so little internal logic anyway that the unlikely ending is not as painful as would normally be the case. Then again, what do I know? I'm only a child.

This was an original story line about a Rub & Tug (massage parlor), directed by Soo Lyu who is very new to movie making and has proven that she has got what it takes to put an entertaining movie together.Clients get more than a massage at this establishment, but the girls refuse to do full service (sexual intercourse). A hand job is about as far as they will go with the customers. The story focuses on three girls and their boss. There is an interesting friction between the gals and their boss which is always amusing. The film doesn't actually show any sexual scenes. The most sexual scene is a dream sequence involving a melting ice-cream cone which won the audience over.The story was inspired by and based on true stories of many gals working in Rub & Tugs. There is a great twist at the end which I won't tell you about as I hope you'll see this film and I don't want to ruin it for you. I can see this becoming a great cult classic along the lines of Mall Rats and Dogma.