Corporate Affairs Reviews

Not even coherent enough to be called trash, CORPORATE AFFAIRS is an irritating mess. This exercise in sloppiness, billed as a romantic comedy, requires its audience to work overtime to make sense of the nonsense onscreen. The schematic plot concerns two corporate rivals in a company called the Kindred Group. There's Jessica Pierce (Mary Crosby), who's a vicious Sigourney Weaver-like CEO bitch. And there's Simon Tanner (Peter Scolari), her impish Robert Morse-like rival. They once were romantically involved but their relationship was destroyed by greed and a love of competition. Their rivalry now fuels the company. They play hardball business that involves sexual bribery, fraud and blackmail. Directed by Terence H. Winkless from a screenplay by Geoffrey Baere and Winkless, CORPORATE AFFAIRS boasts no story to speak of, just an endlessly confusing plot sprinkled with lame cocktail-napkin sexual innuendo. No two of the plot strands connect or amount to anything. It's all just frantic juggling to keep the audience from realizing that there's nothing going on. The characters are diluted versions of characters that were diluted to begin with. We're supposed to like Simon because he has a Whoopi Goldberg-like secretary and we're supposed to hate Jessica because she mistreats her Melanie Griffith-like secretary. Everything is xeroxed down so many generations that the audience has to strain to make it out. Since the script sets up no recognizable human emotions, the actors are cruelly left to their own wits. They seem to be making up the action from line to line. They try to remain above water, splashing frantically, but slowly we watch them drown. CORPORATE AFFAIRS fails at its most basic goal. It isn't even successfully vulgar. The occasional exposed breasts don't make the slightest impact because the viewer is so lost in numbness. It's hard to believe that there isn't a single shred of fun in this film. It's not because the filmmakers are taking the picture too seriously but because no one involved seems to have given a damn. The film was probably made the way most people clean their toilets, very quickly without looking. This entertainment swindle was distributed, stealthily, by MGM/UA Home Video but was made by Roger Corman's company, Concorde Films. Corman has been endlessly praised for the head starts he gives fledgling directors. He's also been called a genius for making and marketing low budget movies. He must be a genius if he can sell this unformed cheese whiz. (Adult situations.)