Bindlestiffs(2012)

Submitted by Tornado Dragon

On his and his friends’ first night in the city, Andrew (Andrew Edwards) strikes up a conversation with an unnamed meth head (Matt Tramel) outside the motel they are staying at and eventually asks him where he can get a prostitute. The meth head directs him to Mike (Sharad Kant Patel), a pimp with a prostitute named Caramel (Adelaide Lummis), and Andrew hires her with the intention of serving her up to Luke (Luke Loftin). He brings her up to the room, and she and Luke go into the bathroom so she can perform her services in there, but minutes later, Luke tells her that he can’t have sex with her because he is mentally out of sorts about all of this. Therefore, with her consent, they pretend to have loud sex so Andrew and John (John Karna) will think that they did the deed, and then they run her panties under the faucet to make it seem like she climaxed. After they exit the bathroom, she heaps praise on him for his “performance” in front of his friends before wringing out her panties and giving them to him, and she kisses him goodbye before leaving.

The following night, John goes to visit his drama teacher, Sheila (Renee Edd), at her apartment in the hope of getting intimate with her somehow (since he has a serious crush on her), but he finds out that she is a lesbian when her partner answers the door and he sees romantic photos of Sheila and her partner on their coffee table. Crestfallen, he leaves, and he ends up sitting next to an old female hobo at a bus stop outside the apartment building. They end up sharing her flask, and as he gets drunker and drunker, he starts to hit on the woman until they both end up having sex in open view. When Andrew and Luke return to the apartment building in Luke’s car to pick up John, they notice from afar what he and the hobo are doing, and thinking that the hobo is raping him, they rush up to them to put a stop to it. Luke whacks the hobo over the head with his flashlight, causing her to fall to the ground motionless, and they come to think that the blow to the head killed her when Andrew (incorrectly) checks her for a pulse and can’t find it.

The guys put her body in a big duffel bag that they have with them, and Andrew and Luke drive up to a random secluded dumpster intending to just toss her in there and leave. However, the drunken John stops them before they can, telling them that he willingly had sex with the hobo and that he feels that he has developed a deep connection with her. After having a shouting match over both John’s actions and what they are going to do with the body, Luke decides that they should take her back to their motel room and figure things out from there. Fortunately, as John is eulogizing her in the room, she suddenly starts moving, having only been knocked unconscious. After John leaves to get some ice for her, Luke inadvertently reveals to Andrew that he and Caramel never had sex, triggering a brief argument between them. They then let the hobo out of the bag, and she goes straight into the bathroom and starts vomiting profusely.

After John returns a short time later, Andrew and Luke inform him of their belief that she might now be pregnant with his child, since John ejaculated inside her while they were having sex and, since it is presently 3:00 a.m., she is puking due to “morning sickness.” As John helps the hobo with her vomiting spell, they suddenly have sex again, and then John begins to cry out of distress over her possibly being pregnant. In the morning, Andrew and Luke wake John up and tell him that he needs to get rid of the hobo, but since John still believes that she might be pregnant, he fishes a pregnancy test out of his family’s survival kit that he brought along. However, since none of them understand how to use it properly, they put it in her mouth like a thermometer and then misread the result as positive. They end up taking her to an abortion clinic to end the pregnancy, where they run into John’s sister, Mindy (Dorcas Leung), who is protesting the clinic with a group of pro-lifers and has a crush on Andrew. After Luke covers for John by telling Mindy that he impregnated the hobo, Mindy takes a look at her and informs the guys that she is too old to have a baby. They celebrate this revelation with the pro-lifers, and Andrew shares a passionate kiss with Mindy.

Back in the motel room that night, Andrew tells his friends that he plans to go ice skating with Mindy on their first date, but Luke quickly figures out that Andrew is just doing that because Holden Caulfield did that very thing with his date, Sally, in The Catcher in the Rye, and he takes a look at Andrew’s copy of the book to get confirmation on this. Things then devolve into an intense argument between the three of them, with Luke and John both lambasting Andrew for trying to act like Holden too much and how they are both getting tired of his behavior, as well as how he lied to them about how this trip was only supposed to be about them. Andrew angrily demands for Luke to give him his book back and warns that he will do something crazy to him if he doesn’t, but Luke just tells him to bring it. Andrew decides to take this opportunity to bring up to John how Luke lied about doing the deed with Caramel, meaning that he had sex with a hobo for no reason because of him, so John curses Luke for lying to him, too. After Luke rips a page out of the book, Andrew launches himself at him and starts wrestling with him. John tries to separate them, but he gets punched in the face by Andrew, and then the book gets torn apart. Andrew then leaves after screaming that he doesn’t need either of them anymore, and John tries to chide Luke some more for deceiving him, but Luke tells him to stay with the hobo and keep her from leaving while he goes out to look for Andrew. Meanwhile, Charlie (Will Fordyce) – the mentally unstable security guard at the boys’ school who misinterpreted the graffiti that the boys got suspended over as a message stating that they are going to shoot up the school – goes out and illegally purchases a gun for what he believes will be an inevitable confrontation between him and them.

Andrew randomly meets up with Mike and the meth head again, and he joins them in their car and smokes crack for the first time with them. However, when he wants to do some more of it and can’t pay for it, he winds up performing oral sex on Mike to get it. He later wanders off in shock over what he just did until he ends up approaching a Ferris wheel, and as he takes a ride on it, he tearfully screams out to Holden Caulfield that he lied to him. While all of this transpires, Luke crosses paths with Caramel just as he is leaving the motel to find Andrew, and they sit down together and chat. He eventually asks her to go out with him on an actual date, and surprisingly, she agrees to, having come to genuinely like him. They then have consensual sex in the shower in his room before she leaves with Mike. While they are doing the deed, John and the hobo are shown lying together on the bed, and John remarks to her what a weird couple of days it has been before telling her that he loves her.

Luke later tells John that they should find Andrew and return home, but he also tells him that they can’t bring the hobo with them. The next morning, John and Luke drive the hobo back to the bus stop where she and John first met, but soon after, John convinces Luke to take her back to their neighborhood with them with the intention of keeping her in the woods behind their school, thinking that it will be much safer for her there than being on the streets. After putting her back in the car, Mindy calls John from the local mall, and she tells him that she just went ice skating with Andrew there. She explains that, out of the blue, Andrew asked her to elope with him (like how Holden did with Sally), and after she turned him down, he took off for parts unknown. John tells her that Andrew is in a weird place right now and that they will go over to the mall and look for him, then hangs up. Luke eventually finds Andrew sitting in one of the cars of the mall’s kiddie train and tells him that they are going home, but Andrew refuses, telling Luke that trains are his life now. Luke decides to join him in his car to talk things out with him, and he explains to Andrew that he is just having an existential crisis, jumping from Catcher in the Rye to now trains, and none of these things are things to build a life from. He then tells Andrew that neither they nor John are cut out to live the kind of life that they have been living these last few days, and it would be better for them to just return home. They and John are then shown sitting on a bench and watching the hobo ride a nearby carousel (like how Holden watched his younger sister, Phoebe, ride a carousel at the end of the novel), and they re-establish their bonds of friendship. However, they are forced to flee when the hobo pukes on the ride.

The guys drive back into their neighborhood with the hobo, and they put her back in their duffel bag and take her down along the outskirts of their school’s property in the direction of the woods behind it. Unfortunately for them, Charlie gets word of their presence and heads out to confront them. The trio stop at a random spot in the woods, but after they unzip the bag to let the hobo out, Charlie gets their attention and aims his gun at them. Just then, the hobo suddenly sits up, and Charlie gets startled so much by her that he shoots and kills her. This sends John into a rage, and he chases after Charlie until he tackles him on the school’s football field and then repeatedly shocks him with his own stun gun until he stops moving.

The movie then cuts to three weeks later, with no explanations given on Charlie’s condition after the attack, whether the three friends were kicked out of school or not, or if anyone faced any legal ramifications from anything. Andrew calls Luke from John’s house and tells him that John is still pretty broken up over the hobo’s death, so he wants him to come over and help him and John give the hobo a memorial service. As the trio perform the service in the back yard and pay their respects to her, they talk about their trip from their own perspectives and speak of the things that they all did, and they all agree that, while everything didn’t turn out the way each of them hoped it would, it was a valuable learning experience. After singing a nearly accurate, off-key rendition of “Amazing Grace,” Andrew and Luke take off and leave John by himself until John eventually trudges back into his house.