MotelX 2025 Review: ANYTHING THAT MOVES Has Sex And Murder On The Brain

Anything That Moves is that rare thing: a truly bizarre oddity of a film, for better or worse. Best described as a pastiche of sexploitation films, mixed with a serial killer thriller, it is something truly special: a sex-positive film that wallows in sleaze. It is also hard-to-follow, sloppily structured, at times poorly acted and infuriatingly stupid. It's not for everyone.

Liam is a sex worker who works for a delivery service, where the clients get some hefty benefits. Everyone in this extremely horny world, fairly detached from reality, is all jacked up, all the time (like in Alex Phillips' former film All Jacked Up and Full of Worms). Liam has a gift to make these extremely horny people have a religious experience every time he makes them orgasm. Gender seems to be only a construct to Liam, as does someone's background. He fucks everyone, from older women, to schlubby guys, and he truly loves the people he fucks. There is a kindness in the portrayal of Liam, especially as he himself is not necessarily a standard Lothario, wearing a red singlet and a toupet, and having a bit of a dorky aura. That is one of the shining aspects of Anything That Moves: there is a very humanistic vibe to the whole ordeal, where Alex Philips and his cast and crew truly believe in the transformative power of sex to bring people together.

It is in sharp contrast with the other big part of the movie: the serial killer thriller. Liam's clients keep turning up dead, and a group of sleazy, homophobic, misogynist cops show up to make Liam and his companion sex worker Thea's life a lot harder. The resulting whiplash between tones is what makes Anything That Moves quite interesting, but at times also a hard watch. Something about the scenes with the cops does not really work. They seem flown in from a different, much more nihilistic movie. That is kinda the point, but Anything That Moves could have gotten a lot more mileage out of the original 15 minutes, which play much like a succession of the opening scenes of porn, where the pizza man delivers a pizza with extra sausage, but then taken to its surrealistic extremes.

Because when the film plays like a pastiche of regular sexploitation works, like the films of Radley Metzger, it truly shines. Anything That Moves is produced by distribution company Vinegar Syndrome, who in the past have turned out to be very reliable when it comes to putting out sexploitation from the sixties, seventies and eighties. Them branching out to make new films is lofty, even though the results may vary. On the one hand you have the atrocious remake of Street Trash, that wallows in the dirt and is happy about that, and on the other hand you have something supremely upsetting and heady like Black-Eyed Susan. Somehow Anything That Moves falls smack-dab in the middle of the two. It has something to say, even though it is not always succinct and clear in how to put it. But it also just loves tits and gore for the sake of tits and gore.

Its mode switches between horror, humor and sex clash as hard as the message and the sleaze. Anything That Moves has too much on its brain, or too little. Either way, it wants to fuck your brains out. It is a truly gonzo piece of filmmaking, and all warnings for that kind of thing apply.