Anything That Moves (2025) – Is It Sexual? Yeah!

Released: 14th September
Seen: 14th September

The final film I saw this year at the Sydney Underground Film Festival was chosen pretty much at random. I ran into that situation that I’m sure a lot of people have run into when it comes to film festivals. I bought a set of 5 tickets and used 4 of them for films I was interested in, so the last one was going to be chosen pretty much at random. I want to note that I entered this movie without any prior knowledge or preconceptions about what it would be like. It’s one of those films where the basic description in the booklet made the final choice for me… probably should’ve picked something else, I’m not going to lie.

Anything That Moves follows delivery boy Liam (Hal Baum) on what should be a regular night for him, a regular night being one where he delivers food and then fucks whoever he delivers the food to, since the service he works for is basically door-to-door prostitution dressed up like a discount Uber Eats (Uber Eats Out?). His night should be going pretty well, fucking all the lonely housewives, couples and men who he can get to, but what’s particularly strange is that the people whom Liam hooks up with seem to be getting brutally murdered shortly after he leaves them. This naturally makes him a suspect in the murders so one would think that he’d have to clear his name… except Liam really never learns about the murders until he’s almost a victim of them. Look, the film is not exactly well thought out.

Instead of a basic plot structure, Anything That Moves seems to run on pure vibes, where the vibe is “Weird 70s sexploitation film crossed with schlock horror” and that vibe kind of goes through everything. The performances are just barely above what you might find in the cheesiest porno, the look is that classic, practical, slightly grainy film texture that’s been lost to time and there isn’t so much a plot as there is a string of events that happen that could seem to tell a story if you squint. There is no real resolution or grand narrative or mystery to solve, sure, there’s been a few murders but most of the film is dedicated to the various ways Liam can fuck.

In the grand sexploitation tradition, there’s an absolute ass-ton of sex scenes in this movie, and to give the film some genuine credit, Liam doesn’t seem to have any real preference in terms of gender of his partners. For a brief moment Anything That Moves seems to imply that it’s just going to be a cliche story of a guy hooking up with all the women he delivers sandwiches to and then slowly the film gets queerer and queerer, something that does certainly make Anything That Moves stand out a little since gay and bisexual characters aren’t in nearly enough movies so it’s always nice to see it presented so casually without the film making a fuss about it. The sad thing is that that detail might be the only thing about this entire film that makes it really worth the time.

There is an urge to compare Anything That Moves on some level to the works of John Waters, it certainly shares some tonal elements of his early work and the reaction shot every character has when they climax does seem like it’s lifted directly from the holy text of A Dirty Shame. You can definitely feel that element buried in there and it’s a comparison that really does help here because Anything That Moves feels like a John Waters film if he phoned everything in and didn’t really give a damn about plot structure. It’s got a hint of the flavour but the meat just isn’t there. Again, the entire film is a vibes-based experience and while that might work for some people, it doesn’t really make this film enjoyable to watch on any real level. It’s not over the top enough to be shocking, it’s not quirky enough to be funny, it’s not twisted enough to be psychotic… it’s an oddity, it feels like it’s lost in time but there’s nothing to really grab onto.

Anything That Moves had the semblance of an interesting idea, a 70s sexploitation film crossed with a slasher could be a ton of fun. There’s potential to be had here, potential this film keeps looking in the general direction of before going off to do something else because it got distracted. It’s a film that almost seems to forget its major plot-thread at one point and only picks it back up because the film is nearly over and we gotta know who the killer is at some point. While it might be a genuinely beautiful film to look at (that 16mm film stock just cannot be denied) it’s not the kind of film that you want to pay attention to.