Chin whiskers and horse-drawn buggies. Women in bonnets and unadorned frocks. Long days of earnest labor and active avoidance of modern conveniences. Amish country isn't the first place you'd imagine the protagonists of a raunchy sex comedy to wind up -- especially on a cross-country road trip intended to slake teenage libidos.
But in "Sex Drive" (which pulls into multiplexes today), a trio of high school senior protagonists travels from suburban Chicago to Tennessee so that virginal uber-goober Ian (Josh Zuckerman) can answer the mother of all booty calls after he meets who he thinks is the girl of his dreams online. The characters find themselves in the Amish homeland after their "borrowed" hot rod throws a gasket.
Rather than encountering Bible-thumbing God-fearing folk there, however, the kids end up at a raucous party-till-you-puke fiesta at which Amish youth shotgun beers, are nude in public, smoke bong hits and mosh to the emo band Fall Out Boy.
This is the movie's depiction of rumspringa: a real-life Amish rite of passage that literally translates to "running around" in Pennsylvania Dutch. During rumspringa, Amish as young as 16 are given a hall pass to engage in rebellious behavior (binge drinking, smoking and casual sex fall under this rubric) so they might enter the Anabaptist church fully informed about what they are giving up.
"They're strict religious shut-ins," John Morris, the film's co-writer, said. "They store it up and go nuts. They unload because they're repressed."
"Sex Drive's" co-writer and director, Sean Anders, said he and Morris considered basing an entire movie around rumspringa after seeing the acclaimed 2002 documentary "Devil's Playground," which features Amish getting hooked on methamphetamines and abusing marijuana and booze while testing the world outside their communities. But ultimately the filmmakers decided to fold rumspringa into a more teen-friendly plot.
"We 'English' have a fascination with these people," Anders said, using the Amish term for people outside their community. "They're the only people in America who really, truly, absolutely do their own thing and don't care what anybody else is up to. And if somebody made up a story about these people that want to live without gadgets and TV, movies and music, nobody would believe it. Then there's this tradition of rumspringa, where they go off and experience the world for a couple of years -- it's stranger than fiction."
