THE GIRLFRIENDS’ CLUB

Four doormats complain about all the feet.

Childhood friends Gretchen, Mary Sue, Pamela, and Dixie are still there for each other decades later, undaunted by disappointment and divorce. Now that saintly Mary Sue has been diagnosed with breast cancer, her friends gather for a final lakeside night together before her mastectomy. She’s gone off to cry herself to sleep when up pops Walter Lambley, Mary Sue’s loathsome boyfriend. He’s raging drunk and waving a videotape, apparently of himself and Mary Sue having sex, and announces he won’t want her anymore after such disfiguring surgery. Her loyal friends, appalled, try to take the video away from him, whereupon Walter falls, breaks his neck on a big rock in the ensuing scuffle, and dies instantly. Gretchen, Pamela, and Dixie summon up the courage to drag his corpse to his Porsche and send it sailing into the lake. No one’s the wiser as the foursome resume their endless kvetching about the men in their lives. Embittered Gretchen never got over her college rape and has never liked sex. She’s divorcing her unfaithful husband. Pamela is trapped in a loveless, childless marriage to a domineering old man and still pines for her first love, a self-absorbed writer. Dixie and her erstwhile soulmate simply drifted apart over the years and she’s now having a secret affair with a married Italian peasant (he actually lives in Italy, which makes it an easy secret to keep). Mary Sue’s doctor-husband ditched her for a tennis-playing socialite, but she has to have a man in her life, hence the need for Walter. A subplot of sorts unfolds as the girlfriends search for other sex videotapes and encounter a mysterious stranger in Walter’s house. Now, who could it be? And who really cares?

Glum, predictable soap opera with a standard twist or two.