In a world completely in thrall to corporate IP and mega-budget computerized imperialist fantasies, we should be eternally grateful to festivals like Fantasia for platforming a genuine underground madman like Alex Phillips. His All Jacked Up and Full of Worms was a highlight of 2023, an insane drug-fueled odyssey that played fast and loose with narrative (or even general coherence) in favor of gross-out gags and a general who-gives-a-fuck vibe. Since then, we’ve gotten other weirdo gems like Braden Sitter Jr.’s delirious The Pee Pee Poo Poo Man and Zach Clark’s The Becomers, true DIY efforts that speak to our collective need for outré, uncompromising artistic visions. This stuff is weird, for sure, but absolutely essential to our cultural ecosystem.
Anything That Moves follows Liam (Hal Baum), a young man who works for a DoorDash-style delivery service that’s actually a front for a sex worker operation. Liam cycles around Chicago alongside his girlfriend Thea (Jiana Nicole), servicing various clients in a series of sex-positive scenarios; truly, Liam will happily fuck… anything that moves. Much of the film’s first act simply follows Liam on his various amorous encounters; he pleasures Julia (Jade Perry), Thea’s sister, and when their father catches them all together, he winds up seducing dear old dad, too. Liam beds an aged starlet, helps Thea enact a cuck fantasy for a single dad, and works as a kind of therapist/surrogate for a couple with a newborn who are experiencing intimacy issues. This being a Phillips film means there’s gonna be some odd stuff, too; at one point, Liam walks down a dark alleyway only for a man a couple of stories up on a fire escape to begin urinating on him. A separate encounter in a remote, wooded area threatens to turn violent, staying just on the right side of fantasy versus a harsher reality. Liam seems to genuinely love his clients, and isn’t satisfied until he makes them cum (a prolonged state of ecstasy dramatized here via bright, heavenly lights and soaring orchestral music). Liam loves the old, the fat, men, women; he’s a true pansexual. But there’s trouble in paradise, as Liam’s clients begin turning up dead after sessions with him. A couple of bumbling cops (played by Jack Dunphy and the great filmmaker Frank V. Ross) obviously suspect Liam, and he begins desperately trying to warn potential victims before they’re targeted.
What we wrote about Full of Worms a couple of years ago applies here, too; Anything That Moves is frequently very funny, a clear case of friends goofing around and trying to one-up each other, seemingly as inspired by sketch comedy, improv, and Johnny Ryan’s Angry Youth Comix as they are by giallo and De Palma. If this new film is more straightforward and coherent as a narrative than its predecessor, Phillips still lets his freak flag fly. There’s more full frontal male nudity here than seemingly in all of Hollywood history combined, and the sex-positive vibes are clearly designed as a thumbing of the nose to mainstream respectability. The final reveal of the killer suggests an even more direct political call to action, as sex workers must unite to fight the repressive forces of law and order that wish to suppress libidinal energies. One suspects that both Robin Wood and John Waters would be proud.
Published as part of Fantasia Fest 2025 — Dispatch 3.
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