Trashy and Exploitive

bkoganbing

The Client List is based on the rather shaky premise that in this day and age one could still believe that when a woman or man for that matter goes to work in a massage parlor one is only giving massages. The only thing that the customers of that parlor want is the love muscle massaged.

When they graduated high school in their small Texas town, Teddy Sears and Jennifer Love Hewitt were the golden couple, he the football star and she the Homecoming Queen. Hewitt's mother Cybill Shepherd even thought her daughter would be Hollywood bound. But the American dream looks like it's turning into a foreclosure nightmare as Sears is injured and their house about to be foreclosed on, one of thousands in the USA during the last decade in home mortgage crunch.

So Hewitt sees an advertisement for work in a massage parlor in a town an hour's drive away and she goes for it. Being a former beauty queen and an empathetic individual she becomes real popular. Then in a burst of puritanical morality fueled by election time, the parlor is raided and closed.

This was based on a real life incident in Texas and Hewitt's character becomes quite the media creature. Need I paint a picture of what this does to her home and family. But it also has some surprising revelations about her relationship to several folks around her.

As this is a Lifetime made for TV film, I wasn't expecting much and Lifetime delivered. Some fine acting doesn't help her, the film is trashy and exploitive.

score 3/10

bkoganbing 2 April 2011

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2407831/