Six sexy Americans alone in a house with nothing to do but get nasty.
This is sex house.

Get ready for the hottest new reality show there is. Your voyeuristic needs will be fulfilled by these six sexy singles locked in a house specifically designed for getting down to business. And that business is sex!

Wait a minute...What? This is The Onion? Okay, let me start over.

Sex House is satirical parody of reality tv shows consisting of ten 6-8 minute long videos, produced by Onion Digital Studios, that aired weekly from July 12, 2012 to September 13, 2012. The premise of the show is pretty common to what you would find on shows like MTV’s Real World or Channel 4’s Big Brother. However, like everything The Onion does, especially their recent run of video series; “Lake Dredge Appraisal”, “Horrifying Planet”, “Trouble Hacking with Drew Cleary”, and the upcoming “Porkin’ Across America”, Sex House holds up a dirty mirror to the norm showing us our world with a biting, dark, wit. Also, like most Onion pieces the joke starts out small and subtle, then grows until it is the elephant in the room. Although in this case, it continued to grow into a mastodon.

The six housemates are (in order of appearance):
Jay (Boyd Harris): He’s the typical frat boy or bro; basically a muscle-bound, loud-mouth, pretty boy, lacking tact or much in the way of intelligence.
Alex (Lea Pascal): The nymphomaniac, exhibitionist, who comes off as slightly disturbing in her over eagerness.
Tara (Ashley Lobo): She is essentially the female equivalent of Jay. A bubble headed party girl in tight clothes.
Erin (Fiona Robert): An eighteen-year-old virgin from a small country town whose “craziest experiences” have been at church parties.
Derek (Chris Boykin): The only black person. The only gay person. He also ends up playing the part of the straight manI see what they did there.
Frank (Jesse Dabson): A forty-five-year-old, married man, and father of two daughters who won a contest.

That is seriously the cast for this show. You’d think that would be the joke. You’d be wrong.

The producers of the show are either incompetent or malevolent. That’s never really made clear. Also, that’s not the joke.

The cast is encouraged at every turn to have sex. Lots of sex. Nasty sex! There are bedrooms and sex toys aplenty, even a sex swing. They are given games to play and encouraging messages. The only addendum is “don’t do anything America doesn’t want to see.”

Ah-ha! There’s the joke!

Nope.

Pretty soon they learn that the house is a little…odd. Apart from the cabinet stocked with an obscene amount of liquor and the wacky chair where the cushions are just rows of upturned boxing gloves, the front door is locked. Behind the curtains are only sheets of plywood. The only food in the house is pumpernickel bread. The air vents blow out alternating blasts of super cold and super hot air. There is no way to take out the garbage.

Still not the joke.

The first night, Erin and Frank have sex. Erin gets pregnant. Jay punches a wall for not being able to have the virgin.

You think you know where this is going, but you’d be wrong.

A few episodes in, Derek has been trying unsuccessfully to convince the others that they are in some sort of danger. The host (Chris Agos), who had never been mentioned up till this point, shows up to ignore Derek’s accusations and get things into gear with some sexy party games.

The party games run the gamut from a stripper who tries teaching the girls to use a stripper pole but ends up breaking her leg and a comedian who encourages the guys to drink and fight, to fetish-wear photo shoots, to sexy Twister, to sexy Settlers of Catan, to chewing up bananas and spitting them in a bucket for Erin to eat. Yet, for some reason, these don’t really do the trick. A psychiatrist is brought in help talk the housemates through their issues. She recommends the best course of action is for them to have sex.

Over the course of the series, things progress from off-kilter mismanagement to nightmarish conditions. The Pumpernickel bread eventually molds over, so they dump it along with the trash in one the bedrooms. A sybian is supplied to the house. It breaks in short order. Voracious white mold covers ever surface of the room where they dump the trash. For a time Derek (the token black guy) is chained to a wall for being disruptive. In order to feed the housemates a large supply of bananas are brought in. Those spoil quickly, becoming covered in fruit flies. To combat the flies, the housemates are given an aquarium full of frogs.

Soon, the housemates revolt and stage an escape. They get gassed.

In one episode, we see the producers have resorted to giving the housemates bottles of some cloudy liquid to drink. It makes then extremely inebriated and barely functional, but after Tara gives some to a frog it melts into a puddle of green goo. Tara barely manages to get the others to stop drinking the cloudy liquid by squirting it in the host’s face causing him to go blind. Once the housemates recover their senses, none of them can remember what they did while on the drink or for how long they had been drinking it.

Another escape is planned, wherein they pretend the sybian is broken. They take the repairman hostage for his tools and chain him up in the mold room. They cover the vents to stop the gas. A masked gimp comes in, and then while the others cower in a room, the gimp beats Frank bloody. Frank just manages to overpower the gimp, but the mold has killed the innocent repairman.

When the producers finally abandon the show, the house mates spend months in isolation, forming a tiny tribal culture, fighting back the mold, and growing a crop of barley in the kitchen. Right before they prepare to start killing the frogs for food, a panel falls off the wall. Behind it is a barred window with an active parking lot beyond. The housemates can see outside for the first time since they entered the house an eternity ago. They could try to break out. They could try calling for help. They decide to put the panel back up and try to forget the window is even there.

The final episode is a typical “reunion episode”. At some point the housemates were released and proceeded to become celebrity bloggers.

The final joke is made.

The joke is that we are given front row seats to observe six people who have been abducted then tortured both physically and mentally before finally being carelessly abandoned, and we just can’t look away. The thought of doing something to help these people doesn’t register. We just want to keep watching to see what will happen next.

I think we have problems.


Episodes:

  1. Meet The Nymphos
  2. Sexy Truth or Sexy Dare
  3. Get On That Pole!
  4. Erin Bares It All
  5. Banana Sex Olympics
  6. Dr. Sex
  7. Sex In A Bottle
  8. Sex Scheming
  9. Sex Climax
  10. Reunion

Children of the Night: The 2012 Halloween Horrorquest

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