The movie opens with former Broadway choreographer Nick DeNoia (Peter Nevargic) getting shot in his office. Most of the story takes place in the early 1980s during the glory days of the Chippendales night club, owned by sleazy businessman Steve Banerjee (Shelley Malil), a rich immigrant from a high-caste Indian family who opened a male strip-club in a quasi-industrial area of Los Angeles. He successfully glamorized the male-stripper concept that captured the fantasies of American women everywhere. Innocent college graduate Chad Patterson (Johnathan Aube) gets a job at the club to make some extra money, but is corrupted by the money and lifestyle. Then DeNoia gets involved in a blackmail scandal and Banerjee gets illegal ideas of his own.
Based on fact, the film shows the grudge between Banerjee and Denoia. Once Denoia gets wise to Banerjee's shady dealings he quickly blackmails the club owner into signing away the touring rights to the show. But when it comes to underhanded manipulations, Banerjee proves Denoia's equal. Fuelled by paranoia and jealousy, Banerjee arranges DeNoia's murder, a crime he might have got away with if the FBI hadn't learned of his subsequent plot to assassinate the businessmen behind a rival male dance troupe to eliminate his only competition.
This true-crime drama features an eccentric cast of characters whose lives are powered by the incessant beat of 1980's synth-rock and disco music, all of which takes place against the backdrop of a stage-show in which some of America's most beautiful men strip down in front of crowds of horny women. But Chippendales' dance routines are not sexy, with too many crowd shots and not enough footage of the strippers themselves. Anyone hoping to gain some understanding of their appeal, or just to gawk at some mouth-watering beefcake, will be quite disappointed. The entire film has unexpectedly dark humor and a sense of irony, with a script that isn't very tight, and it sometimes goes off on tangents that add little to the film. But the actors are good, though fairly one-dimensional, with most of the Chippendales themselves portrayed as self-destructive drug addicts, or shallow sex-obsessed fools who take advantage of the most attractive women in their audiences. Basically, the increasingly convoluted nature of the conspiracies and counter-conspiracies make for a fascinating ride. Straight-to-video filmmaker David Payne wrote and directed "Just Can't Get Enough: The True Story of the Chippendales' Murders".
