Bad Bizness

Fast Fact: Traci Bingham studied at Harvard before become an actress. Also, she has giant fake breasts.Meanwhile, a maid rolls her cart up to a hotel room and bangs on the door a few times before letting herself in. "Hola, senorita?" she says in an exaggerated and vaguely offensively stereotypical Mexican accent. Finding an empty room to clean must be a novel occurence because she slowly and timidly moves through the suite, before entering the bathroom and finding the corpse of a naked girl sprawled on the floor with a bag over her head. The maid screams, somehow even managing to make that sound stereotypically Mexican, and runs away.

The scene cuts to the hotel bar where the two hotel cops are having some drinks and talking to the bartender, who shows them a revolver he has hidden under the bar in what is in no way a foreshadowing of things to come. They get a phone call from their jerk boss, telling them about the corpse, and then quickly run up to the room, drawing their guns and pointing them in random directions, even though the killer is obviously long gone. Once inside the room they ask the hysterical maid what happened, and she responds in some sort of pidgin Spanish, like "si senorita, el bano taco burrito" or whatever. Sandra runs into the bathroom and glances at the naked corpse for approximately 0.8 seconds. "Looks like she's been dead for four or five hours," says Sandra, for whom the correspondence course in hotel security has obviously paid off.

Sandra and Pete thank the maid and she replies telling them to gracias el pollo loco, and the hotel cops head back to meet with their boss, who has decided not to call the real cops, saying that it's "bad for business." Just then the phone rings and the boss puts it on the speakerphone, announcing that it's the owner. The scene shifts to Las Vegas, where Master P FINALLY shows up, sitting in his top floor office, dressed in a hobo overcoat and wearing a visor that conveniently reads "LAS VEGAS". Apparently he's the owner of the entire resort, and he begins upbraiding the rent-a-cops for trying to open a murder investigation that could potentially be bad for bizness. "Great," I thought. "Now Master P is going to fly out and set things straight." Instead, Sandra is given 72 hours to solve the case, which is strange considering that murder investigations generally fall under the jurisdiction of actual law enforcement agents.

O Master P, where art thou?Instead of following the hotel cops as they try to catch a serial killer, the scene shifts to a blond surfer dude sitting in a hotel room and yelling at someone on a phone before a hooker comes in and they have bad Cinemax-style sex. At this point things began to click in my head: strippers? Hookers? Gratutious nudity? B-list actresses playing hard boiled roles? This isn't just eerily similar to a bad Cinemax skin flick, this is a bad Cinemax skin flick. I like boobs as much as the next guy but I thought I was spending my hard earned money to watch Master P mumble his way through hackeneyed expository dialogue. Unfortunately the next hour consists of the following sequence of events repeated three or four times:

• The hotel cops wonder about who the killer could possibly be
• Someone has a softcore porn scene
• A hooker is murdered
• Master P calls up and mumbles some more

Among the various revelations that take place is that Sandra's little sister was murdered ten years ago, that there's a madam operating a prostitution ring out of the hotel, and that the entire movie actually takes place in the Phillipines, which makes me wonder if all Filipino maids are Spanish-speaking white girls. None of this managed to drag me out of the funk of realizing that the whole Master P angle was just a cheap ploy to get me to watch this shitty softcore porno.

At the end of the movie Sandra is no closer to solving the murder than she was originally when her partner Pete calls and tells her to meet him in the hotel bar to talk about some information. When she arrives the room is deserted, and as she nervously glances around the doors magically slam shut and the disco ball starts shining as Pete cackles with triumph and reveals that it was he who murdered all the girls for some reason or other. Sandra wanders around with her gun drawn before being knocked down by Pete. Just as he is about to kill her, Pete is then shot dead by the bartender, who I guess happened to be standing there the whole time. Then Master P calls up and congratulates Sandra on a job well done, despite not actually solving anything, and only catching the bad guy when he purposely revealed himself and was killed by another untrained hotel employee. Great, job, Sandra.

After watching "Bad Bizness" I was left caring so little about it that I can barely even assign it a rating. To give you an idea of what I mean, I was left hoping that Master P would have a larger acting role. I hope you can appreciate what sort of horrible sequence of events can possibly lead up to such a state of mind, because I can barely believe it myself. No more movies about people pretending to have sex. From now on I will stick solely to movie about people pretending to act.

– Andrew "Linguica" Stine