Las Vegas- You can say one thing about local filmmaker Christopher Robin Hood: After making one feature that played a handful of film festivals but never went beyond that, he’s figured out how to turn a profit from his filmmaking.
Hood’s latest project as writer, director, producer and editor, The Casino Job, certainly won’t win any film-festival accolades, but it’s already been picked up by a small distributor for release on DVD; you can find it in video stores, at online outlets and even in Redbox kiosks, and rights have been sold for a number of foreign countries.
It’s certainly not hard to see why. To be blunt, The Casino Job is softcore porn, the kind of thing you’d be embarrassed to watch even on Cinemax at three in the morning. Its story is mainly an excuse for its female stars to take off their clothes as often as possible, and its sex scenes are plentiful and gratuitous.
Along the way, there is a halfway decent idea for a plot, about a group of four strippers conspiring to rob a casino owned by a sleazeball who raped one of them. Hood pays more attention to the ways he can get his actresses to disrobe than to working out the mechanics of the heist, though, and the acting is so awkward and wooden that none of the scheming comes off as remotely believable.
It’s possible, with some clever writing and decent acting, to turn a low-budget B-movie like this into something enjoyable. But with its cruddy look, soporific performances and sloppy plotting, The Casino Job manages to make even watching naked strippers in a hot tub a laborious experience.