| reviews & features | by movie | by theater | film specials | hot links |

Ringmaster

This amounts to an elongated episode of Jerry Springer's notorious tabloid TV talk show, where the audience gets to go behind the cameras and discover how Springer and crew panhandle for dirty laundry. The faux drama revolves around a trailer-trash mom, her fellatio-feasting daughter, the man of the trailer (the employment-challenged stepfather, whom they both sleep with), and the farm-boy fiancé -- who unwittingly takes his fiancée's diaphragm for a test drive with his mother-in-law-to-be. That's good enough to get them on Springer's show, along with a couple of hip-hop sisters from Detroit who have dogged their best friend's man. Things get even dicier when the rednecks and the Motown crew get set up in the same LA hotel, where a whole lot of bed games and selfish depravity goes down.

Fans of Jerry will be ecstatic over the unbridled use of profanity and gratuitous servings of T&A. The writers even try to make the trashy characters likable, though everyone dwells at the same level of contemptuous amorality. But the most reprehensible act in the film comes from Springer himself: not his being in bed and having sex to his favorite episode, but his outburst of moral vindication in the wake of an emotional fracas that was carefully incited by his salacious muckraking.

-- Tom Meek