There's Some Weird, Weird Stuff on Late Night Cable

So I'm flopped on the couch last night, suffering from insomnia, flipping around the channels. The cool thing about cable nowadays is that it actually tells you what is on the station you have reached; no longer do you have to squint at the screen and try to figure out which obscure Michael Caine movie is on.

So I'm flicking around, and I come to a 2003 movie called "Super Sucker". The synopsis (yeah, they provide one of them too) says that it's about a rivalry between two groups of vacuum cleaner salesmen, one of whom finds success when they find a vacuum cleaner attachment that proves very popular.

Automatically, this sounds really dirty.

But the movie (which I've never heard of, and which I'm 100% sure never got a theatrical release) stars Jeff Daniels, so how dirty can it be?

It has been on for about 25 minutes, so even though I hate entering movies in the middle, I linger, figuring that it should be about plot point one, and I'll get to see what this attachment is.

So Jeff Daniels and his crew are struggling to sell vacuums door-to-door, and Jeff knocks off early one day, and goes home, only to hear his wife moaning from the bedroom.

So he bursts in on her. And finds herself pleasuring herself with the vacuum cleaner.

Yikes.

Turns out that the vacuum cleaner has an attachment meant for drapes that (I kid you not) has a little spinning brush that pops in and out of the middle, and an easy button that switches the vacuum from blowing to sucking to blowing to sucking, something that the characters are so happy about that they keep talking about it.

Of course, this isn't really a porn movie, because there's no nudity (despite the R rating), even though the plot has them selling this attachment to every woman in town, and apparently it works for men too. The story gets silly late, with chases, and government agencies that shut them down, though there really isn't any exploration of whether it is actually right or wrong to have sex with your vacuum cleaner, or what the law would even say about it.

(But kids, I'm not sure you should try this as home).

So I watched the last hour of the movie, somewhat dumbfounded, wondering how the movie could even be made. It doesn't seem like the kind of movie that has a particularly good shot at being released in theaters, but it isn't really raunchy enough to seem like a solid genre entry either. It's just sort of a sniggering tale about women masturbating offscreen with vacuum cleaners.

I mean, how much do you have to pay Jeff Daniels to be in something like this? Can I pay him half that much to be in my movie?

Finally the closing credits roll up, and a lot becomes clear.

Written by Jeff Daniels. Directed by Jeff Daniels.