'An erotic thriller'

they sound great.

Not that we all watched it or anything.

Tom - 'giving it some moan'? Hein?

'Only when you start giving it a bit of welly, matey'.

It is very effective Tom. Ha ha ha.

Here in Belgium, VT4 is probably closest to C5 (also Kanaal2 to an extent, but they also have Buffy, so can't knock them too much). AB3 shows genuine erotica and Canal+ hardcore porn. These continentals are so sophisticated.

A lot of them are made by Zalman King, who wrote '9 and 1/2 Weeks' and starred in 'Blue Sunshine', a great 70s exploitation pic where people take a type of LSD that turns them bald and psycho!

Perhaps the nearest thing to an auteur in the genre is the director Gregory Hippolyte (sp) who also makes hardcore under the name Gregory Dark, and pop videos for people like Britney Spears (I think 'Hit Me Baby One More Time' was one of his!)

It featured Nazis and some kind of sinister plot. There were great bits when these people would be shagging away (in a not actually shagging kind of way) and would then turn and give the Hitler salute to a huge wall mounted swastika.

being a Nazi is cool.

HA HA HA HA HA

GAH.

why did erotic thrillers have to die as a genre? I really love them.

im watching poison ivy starring DREW BARRYMORE on instant netflix right now

1) Lisa Boyle was way hott!! She was in like the first Bad Boys movie.

2) Blue Sunshine is a movie I desperately want to see.

3) The movie that Norman Phay was talking about, about the family that hates each other, is called Friend of the Family starring Shauna O'Brien as Elke the hot tenant that shags everyone.

didnt u see CHLOE

im watching poison ivy starring DREW BARRYMORE on instant netflix right now

Is that the one with Max Headroom as the dad?

tom skerritt is the dad

what does everyone think of SLIVER? the soundtrack is pretty great.

i think in 1994 the concept of PEOPLE WATCHING YOU was way more edgy.

Doesn't Poison Ivy have Alyssa Milano in it as well? The sequel is where the blond girl from My Name is Earl got her big break...

Even though I've seen Exotica, I'm still kinda weirded out about Egoyan making high-class softcore...there was a time in my adolescence when I was a little obsessed w Canadian art-films, and I really liked The Sweet Hereafter...

Poison Ivy 2 has Alyssa Milano in it

Poison Ivy 3 is the one w/ Jaime Presley

i like erotic thrillers with sexual awakenings (poison ivy 2, lake consequence) but i also like ones about women being stalked (lady beware, sliver)

You ever see Boxing Helena?

No idea why I had Matt Frewer in my mind as a guy getting cut with a knife in that movie.

Meanwhile, this is hilarious:

http://img34.imageshack.us/img34/8066/screenshot20110227at125.png

yes ive seen boxing helena tons of times

its pretty ridic

i used to think that sex scene in boxing helena w/ julian sands and the nurse was soooooooooooo hot

i was like 15

has anyone seen lake consequence?

its pretty great. its also on instant netflix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7eNUq7004WI

i also HIGHLY RECOMMEND the lifetime movie with eric roberts (love him) and anne heche - FATAL DESIRE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFS2B6W6Y8o

Yeah I saw Lake CQ way back in the day. My memory's a bit fuzzy about the actual movie but there was a jacuzzi 3some on the video box; I'll never forget that.

One movie like that I always wanted to check out but never did was Angels and Insects. Did you ever see that one, h2?

yup, seen it. i dont really think of that as an erotic thriller, though. the costumes are pretty.

i think it's worth a watch, though

I remember a movie with Anne Heche and Joan Chen in it called Wild Side. Theywere lesbian hookers in it iirc. Christopher Walken was in it too. He fuck some dude in the ass for trying to rape one of the women.

(I probably wouldn't call that movie an erotic thriller either)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5mvEazWjM-0

ugh, billy baldwin is so gross

See, is he in that? I only saw the last third of the movie, and it was years and years ago. I only mentioned it bcz of the Heche/Chen connection...

I used to be obsessed with all sorts of random movies I watched on late night HBO or Cinemax. There was this weird European B-movie called Night of the Archer that I saw once and was obsessed with for a long time...

I'm back!!!!

With one of my FAVORITE EROTIC THRILLERZ,

STARRING BRUCE WILLIS

'COLOR OF NIGHT'

Okay so this movie is really amazing. I remember when it came out on VHS in 1994 my sister rented it and it really blew my mind.

So here's the sitch: BILL CAPA (DIE HARD's BRUCE WILLIS) is a psychiatrist who is suffering from MAJOR GUILT and COLOR BLINDNESS (GET IT--COLOR of NIGHT? GET IT???) after his amazing patient, Michelle, jumps out of a building after a confrontation. Seriously, Michelle is only in the movie for about two minutes and they are the best two minutes of the movie.

DON'T BELIEVE ME, PLEASE WATCH THIS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lm9gGo_i0ls&feature=player_embedded

The score is also really amazing and reminds me of PC adventure games like THE 7TH GUEST

So anyway, after BILL CAPA experiences this TERRIFYING EVENT, he goes to visit his long time colleague, Bob--played by SCOTT BAKULA.

Are you into this yet?

Anyway, anyway, BOB is ALSO a shrink and leads some group therapy session comprised of a motley crue of rag tag crazies (GROUP OF CRAZIES: LESLIE ANN WARREN, the guy who plays the robot in ALIENS, the doctor from DEADWOOD, and someone that looks like an extra from Planet of the Apes). BUT THEN OMG BOB DIES AND BILL HAS TO TAKE OVER THE THERAPY GROUP. DO PEOPLE REALLY HAVE THERAPY GROUPS LIKE THIS? Somehow the therapy group scenes really remind me of the movies my friends and I made in highschool, with really over the top dialogue and ridiculousness.

BILL then meets a sexy girl with rabbit teeth and gross hair and they pork in the pool and there's this amazing sex scene montage. The best bit is after they're fucking Bruce has this really outrageous sounding grunting orgasm, and rabbit teeth girl is gasping, "I WANT YOU TO GET DRESSED UP FOR ME!" Cut to Bruce in a monkey suit seated at a table. Rabbit teeth girl makes him a steak and sits at the table naked. He says he's not hungry. She says, "I have something you might want..." CUT RIGHT BACK TO THEM PORKING WHILE THE SOARING SOUNDTRACK BLARES! It's out of this world!

So it turns out someone in the therapy sesh is one of the killers, OBVIOUSLY

I WON'T GIVE ANY SPOILERS but the movie goes on about 30 minutes too long but every single second of it is amazing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-TPQSYZI_Y

they don't make these anymore, do they? such an 80s/early 90s thing

S: Wild Orchid, 9 1/2 Weeks, Blown Away

Dressed to Kill = gold standard.

yeah, internet porn killed this sexy genre

the one with max headroom is "far from home" which is a really weird mix of erotic thriller and abc afterschool special.

this may have been mentioned already.

I see Boxing Helena is mentioned upthread, that movie is amazing.

Boxing Helena

omg "Far From Home"! what a weird fucking movie

"okay, so it's gonna be 'deliverance' meets 'my girl'."

haha i dont even think 'my girl' had come out at that point but it gives you the general vibe

wait waht

maybe I should see this

I remember being totally transfixed by that movie, partially because I kept waiting for Matt Frewer to do a callback to Max Headroom and partially because the tone shifts were so drastic and bizarre.

EVERYONE should see "Far From Home" IMO

shot at the Burning Man site and starring Jennifer Tilly, Matt Frewer, and Drew Barrymore!?!

I'm IN

When I first saw it, I think I missed the first 3-4 minutes so there was a good long period of time where I was convinced it was taking place in a dystopian post-apocalyptic near-future.

how does 'erotic thriller' compare to 'psychosexual thriller'

feel like law and order: svu kinda fills this niche too, minus boobs :(

Boxing Helena is RIDICULOUS. I've seen it way more times than I probably should have. The Warlock is awesome in it.

Homo doens't Willis go full frontal in Color of NIght? Pretty sure there is peen to be seen in that one.

BILL then meets a sexy girl with rabbit teeth and gross hair and they pork in the pool and there's this amazing sex scene montage. The best bit is after they're fucking Bruce has this really outrageous sounding grunting orgasm, and rabbit teeth girl is gasping, "I WANT YOU TO GET DRESSED UP FOR ME!"

It's during the pool scene. I'm sure of it.

Also iirc rabbit teeth girl was Jane March who was in the film version of The Lover and for a while everyone was acting like she was going to be the next big thing but it never really happened for her.

Willis has done full frontal in a few movies hasn't he? (12 Monkeys iirc?)

Oh man I haven't seen 12 Monkeys in a long time so I'm not sure.

Bruce just wants everyone to see his willis

'erotic thriller' y/n:

romeo is bleeding
angel heart
after dark, my sweet

how does 'erotic thriller' compare to 'psychosexual thriller'

less french

Whispers in the Dark, with Annabella Sciorra and Alan Alda (not coupling).

Also, if you cross Network with Hart to Hart, you get
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDpsFPM2NF4

I can't believe I haven't seen JADE!

didn't we have an erotic thriller poll recently? was that on the sandbox?

that cast is so 1995: caruso! fiorentino! palmintieri! EVERHART!

~~ Erotic Thrillers of the 80s and 90s ~~

palminteri! i can't even spell the guy's name right. funny how he was such a big deal for about a week.

Yeah. It seems like there was a spell when he had minor parts in tons of things.

now he has tons of parts in minor things (owned)

Chazz Palminteri recently opened a restaurant in Baltimore called "Chazz: A Bronx Original," i'm not kidding

x-lol

You go and tell us how it is. OK?

believe me, i want to

I can't believe I haven't seen JADE!

You should definitely see it.

should have called it chazz'z

jade is so ridiculous, almost "color of night" ridiculous

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_aXAlSl02U

Memorable quotes for
Jade (1995) More at IMDbPro »

Lew Edwards: I do the fucking, I never get fucked!
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David Corelli: Cristal, Baluga, Wolfgang Puck... it's a fuckhouse.
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it's amazing that it took more than a decade for david caruso to become a proper camp icon

Bet Shame will be included in the 'canon' for this in 5 years.

I wanna see Shame

Though they sucked, I miss the "erotic thriller" of yesteryear. American cinema has basically no libidinal component at this point. 70s carnality could at least occasionally be "free", cheerful and all but meaningless. This was still true in the 80s (so many boob-laden teen comedies), but it was more and more frequently used to invoke emotional meltdowns and punishment by knife-wielding maniacs. By the end of the 90s, it had almost entirely vanished, Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls arguably the final nail. These days, our perversions seem to have been scrubbed from family-friendly theater screens, confined to designated filth pits like the internet and HBO series. Sad.

guess i'm referring mostly to overt titillation as an audience lure in american pop cinema. aside from weirdly squeaky-clean teen fodder like american pie...

I miss these movies, too. What made them for me were examinations / explorations of human desire and emotions ... sex, lust, obsession, an element of experiencing something natural yet wrong, something inside ourselves taken a little too far. It's a weird and interesting sensation.

Don't know why they don't make these types of movies anymore, maybe it doesn't appeal to the whole contemporary "feel good everyday! everything is normal and peachy keen!" mentality. Which I find utter bullshit. Life's interesting because it can skew in so many different ways.

yeah the way every hit movie these days is about people feeling good and peachy keen is really tiresome

yeah like doesnt the bad acting and questionable eroticism live in on megahits like twilight even today?

i guess thats a lot more prurient and moralizing (and no tits) but i mean

haha 'even today'

LOL this thread

Some dude otmfm abt peachy keenness btw

I am pretty sure internet porn killed this genre. I miss sex in movies. Like unrealistic sex with lots of thigh high stockings and muted trumpets. These movies shaped a lot of my sexuality! I used to sneak downstairs to watch crap like this on Showtime when I was an adolescent. I said recently that trying to look and feel sexy is my motivation for about 75% of my actions. And it's totally true. I blame backlit sweaty sex scenes and Shannon Tweed.

Also SHAME sucked and it wasn't erotic or thrilling

downloading JADE right now.

you are in for a treat, and the most 1995 movie cast ever

as I stated a year ago apparently

i was going to mention CHLOE but I mentioned it two years ago apparently

what I am downloading right now

JADE
FLASHDANCE
BOXING HELENA

its going to be a great weekend

omg all of LADY BEWARE is on youtube!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9L349DPyuU

if I found a man who thought I was sexy in hair rollers and loved erotic thrillers I think I will have found my soulmate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvJFgixTAxM

is this the campiest genre ever

def the most erotic

but, weirdly, NOT the most thrilling

heh

I just meant in the classic Susan Sontag "Notes on Camp" sense. They are p much never actually erotic or thrilling and the ways in which they fail, oh so seriously, at both, is truly a joy.

xp

this year during the erotically thrilling portion of our Thanksgiving Family Film festival I think we're going to cue up In the Cut and/or Body Heat (assuming I can find either tbh). Still never seen Far From Home or Poison Ivy (also hard to find)

Poison Ivy is HILARIOUS

this is not the kind of genre that gets deluxe Criterion Edition reissues, let me tell you

if you've ever wanted to see tom skerritt boning down with drew barrymore on the hood of a car then a) poison ivy is gonna be your jam and b) wtf is wrong with you

Far From Home I remember as being very creepy. It's basically a budget Psycho and I bet I would find it hilarious if I watched it now.

in the Cut isn't completely worthless

being directed by a woman def makes it a rarity in the genre

I think of erotic thrillers as kind of a parallel genre to my one of my other favorite "terrible" subgenres, the teen sex comedy. Both rooted in the medium's newfound freedom to crassly exploit sexuality but one was "serious" and geared towards "adults" while the other was willfully stupid and geared towards adolescents.

not quite sure which one is which there tbh

I just realized that the "love interest" in "Far From Home" is one of the original Broadway cast members of Rent

would 'the big easy' qualify as an erotic thriller? presence of late '80s Ellen Barkin would point to yes, but idk.

wikipedia has a handy graphic to help us determine the answer

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/c/c7/Erotic_Thriller_Venn_Diagram.png/220px-Erotic_Thriller_Venn_Diagram.png

It's pretty clear that whatever is going on in Game of Thrones squeezes in there somewhere. Boobs plus thrills plus fantasy.

I need more labels on that Venn diagram

GoT is v erotic thriller-y

erotic thrillers tend to involve less shooting and more stabbing iirc.

The Last Seduction is maybe the best and funniest one of these?

Or Wild Things, at least as far as self-conscious riffs on erotic thrillers go.

xpost The shooting and stabbing is what makes them so thrilling!

Is the "psychological thriller" kind of the more reputable version of this genre? One that I remember really liking at the time was Final Analysis (saw it as a double feature with Memoirs of an Invisible Man!), with Richard Gere, Kim Basinger and the least subtle Hitchcockian pretensions this side of De Palma. I'm pretty sure it had some mildly steamy sex in it, but as it came out around the same time as Basic Instinct, that film quickly overshadowed it, though I remember thinking even at the time that FA was a lot more fun.

Just saw "Body Heat" for the first time. Pretty blah, imo, except for Ted Danson's eccentric lawyer. Can William Hurt act? I could have sworn I've seen him act, but not here. Not sure Kathleen Turner is acting here, either. Was that intentional? Anyway, if you are going to riff on "Double Indemnity," it does not behoove you to do so dumber and duller.

Can William Hurt act?

In the same sense that John Wayne acted. I'm pretty sure he altered his normal personality somewhat when the camera was rolling, but sometimes it is hard to tell any character he played from any other character.

Soft in the Middle: The Contemporary Softcore Feature in Its Contexts by David Andrews.

Soft in the Middle demonstrates that softcore's under-the-radar success and pervasive cultural devaluation may be understood in terms of the "postfeminist" strategies employed by successive generations of producers and distributors, each intent on overcoming obstacles to the mainstream distribution of pornographic material. Softcore and its American precursors became more "feminized" and "female friendly" as their distribution widened, a process hastened in the 1980s by the industry's transition to private, non-theatrical modes of distribution and exhibition (e.g., home-video outlets and premium-cable networks). One of the byproducts of this development is that contemporary softcore has frequently resorted to what are arguably anti-male or "misandristic" attitudes and depictions. Clearly, the genre challenges traditional assumptions about pornography, including those held by feminists on both sides of "the porn debates."

The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema by Linda Ruth Williams is another but I think it leans a bit more toward the mainstream side of the genre.

I recall one film with appalling hair metal style.

Expecting these films to be genuinely good (ie better than Double Indemnity!) is maybe not the best approach.

Xp

this is not the kind of genre that gets deluxe Criterion Edition reissues, let me tell you

― Οὖτις, Monday, 21 August 2017 21:37

https://www.eurekavideo.co.uk/classics/wild-orchid

Close enough.

My favourite is probably Disclosure, although that might be too big-budget/message-y to really count--it's at the Merchant-Ivory end of the spectrum.

Was the genre pretty much invented by Body Heat? I can't think of anything earlier than that.

I spent a week interning with the Manchester Evening News, and one day I went to a screening with their film critic. I don't remember what we saw, nothing very good, but I was impressed by the bonhomie of the small circle of local critics. It seemed like a pleasant little club. The guy I was interning with had seen Sea of Love and another critic asked him about it. "It's well done," he said. "It has Ellen Barkin bonking -- so, you know, that's always good."

So I have basically thought of erotic thrillers ever since as "Ellen Barkin bonking" movies.

"in the cut" is great! wayy more going on than the typical skerritt fodder and it includes mark ruffalo memorably saying about an ex that she "had no sense of cock"

Was the genre pretty much invented by Body Heat? I can't think of anything earlier than that.

Wld say that it stretches back at least as far as the Lana Turner Postman Always Rings Twice, in the 1940s (from a novel by James M Cain of course, also the author of Double Indemnity, the obvious inspiration for Body Heat). Also, the European Giallo of the 1970s definitely established the template/formula of violent murder and softcore sex/nudity.

the typical skerritt fodder

poor tom skerritt - you bone drew barrymore on the hood of a car in one movie and you're suddenly the male shannon tweed

my memory is hazy but i recall poison ivy being FAR from the skerr-bear's only adventure on the wrong side of the erotic tracks

huh, he was in wild orchid ii apparently - none of the other movies on his imdb page ring any 'late night on channel 5' bells for me but then they don't ring any other bells either

what a chequered career that guy's had

A Touch of Scandal (1984)
Katherine Gilvey is a comely councilwoman, whose campaign for Attorney General is being managed by her ambitious, but cold-hearted husband Benjamin, which takes a turn when photographs surface of her liasion with a male prostitute, who used to be a law client of hers, and has now turned up dead. Also is a note telling her to withdraw from the campaign or the photos will be made public. Investigating on her own, Katherine's suspects to the idenity of the blackmailer are: a shadowy power broker, a charismatic minister, an activist priest, or even her own husband.

Calendar Girl Murders (1984)
Millionaire Richard Trainor is celebrating the fact that his new calendar featuring twelve nude woman is a huge success. However the party is ruined when Miss January is pushed off a building and later on that night Miss February is knifed to death. Policeman Lieutenant Dan Stoner is assigned to the case and he immediately strikes a friendship with photographer Cassie Bascomb. While Dan investigates the case Cassie is attacked. What connection is she to the case and will the killer be caught before he/she reached Miss December?

hawt

The 1968 Pretty Poison w/ Anthony Perkins and Tuesday Weld is really great, but prob belongs to the Gun Crazy/Honeymoon Killers/Badlands fucked up crim couple genre rather than the bonking on a car bonnet genre.

Millionaire Richard Trainor is celebrating the fact that his new calendar featuring twelve nude woman is a huge success.

same

"a comely councilwoman" *sets TIVO*

Lieutenant Dan Stoner

same

Pretty Poison is an amazing film

I wouldn't expect any movie to be better than Double Indemnity, but Body Heat is at least designed to bounce ideas off of that template - but it has no ideas. I like Kasdan, though, so I suppose I was surprised how just as a movie it wasn't that great. Very much akin to Cat People. Smart, talented guy remaking a '40s classic as, well, an erotic thriller, except not very thrilling, and often boring, though I guess mildly erotic, in the late night cable "boobs!" sense. Body Heat felt less like a "modern" take on stuff like Double Indemnity and more that the template for something like "Basic Instinct," with which it shares a lot in common.

Interesting idea that giallo et al. set the stage for this. I'd argue that those movies put the emphasis on the thriller stuff; the kills are the sex scenes, which is why they have more in common with typical tawdry slashers. But take someone like DePalma, a clearer giallo descendent - is Dressed to Kill an erotic thriller? Is Body Double? Did Hitchcock invent the erotic thriller? Was Psycho an erotic thriller? Vertigo? Frenzy? Is Eyes Wide Shut? Was Blue Velvet? Can a movie class itself out of being an 'erotic thriller?' Does it require a certain Cinemax/beat up VHS box cover trashiness?

xpost Sea of Love, though, I recall that making a splash. Def. rescued two major careers.

Vadim's Pretty Maids All in a Row - that kind of sets the template a little, doesn't it? Or is it still too weird, too much killer on the loose stuff?

love to be thrilled by eyes wide shut

body heat had a weird cred with certain film cognoscenti in the 90s iirc

Know I mentioned this before on ILX - and look away now, mark s - but Fredric Jameson in his 'Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' identified Body Heat as a key postmodern text (pastichey, unmoored from signification etc etc) along with Blade Runner, so I think that's why maybe certain film cognoscenti picked up on it.

is Dressed to Kill an erotic thriller?

That's the other one I thought of as a launch point. It was 1980, Body Heat was the next year. Both of them flash their influences (along with other things), but I think they're where the Hollywood erotic thriller template really emerges. It is a very '80s genre, best watched on VHS.

I guess there are still plenty of people writing books like these?

The big used book store near me has an entire shelf devoted to them. "50 Shades of Gray" rejuvenated the genre if it needed rejuvenating.

lol just the mention of jameson has put me in a bad mood

It's not the same thing, but there were a couple of tawdry, glossy mid-'70s films--The Eyes of Laura Mars and Lipstick--that seem connected to the straight-to-video erotic thrillers that were churned out in the '90s. (I've only seen the first, but I think they're similar.)

Did Hitchcock invent the erotic thriller?

Now I'm picturing The Lodger and Blackmail as proto-ETs. I suppose Nosferatu, and probably other expressionist silents, put violence or other danger conspicuously close to sex.

Speaking of "Body Heat," I'd always (for obviously reasons) associated that one with "Body Double," which I'd seen before and not liked. But I put it on again, anyway, and wow, how shitty is this movie. But it did lead me to Ebert's review, which is full of all sorts of not OTM stuff, starting with the 3 1/2 stars and continuing with stuff like:

But the movie is not just an exercise in style. It is also a genuinely terrifying thriller

Yes it is, no it's not.

Although his "Scarface" was more of a serious social commentary

No it fucking wasn't.

The burial sequence next to the Hollywood reservoir, for example, or the photography in the tunnel during one of Jake's attacks of claustrophobia, are so uninhibited that they skirt the dangerous edge of being ridiculous.

Skirt?

Craig Wasson is such a nonentity in that movie. De Palma should've waited a few years until James Spader was right for the role.

Or Bill Maher, if he just had to have a Craig Wasson lookalike.

"a comely councilwoman" *sets TIVO*

― mark s, Friday, August 25, 2017 10:30 AM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

No need, ILX has you covered: Local councillors

Calendar Girl Murders (1984)

I've seen this! for some reason. it's terrible.

Body Double is incredible, it transcends Wasson's leaden performance

and yes it is ridiculous BUT - in the classic DePalma way - I think it is legit good, it goes so hard on the camp and exploitation that it achieves a weird fever-dream tone that is fantastic and genuinely disturbing.

I might agree if he were not so consistently lurid and OTT. It might work better were the acting and writing not so shitty, unless they were both shitty on purpose, which I am not sure makes things much better. Bad on Purpose is a really tricky thing to pull off, let alone as a feature.

Like, it's already a borderline tongue-in-cheek riff on Hitchcock, which of course De Palma has made a career of, but then you factor in in terrible casting and acting and I'm just not sure what he is going for.

See, I think y'all are lumping together what I think of as two distinct kinds of movies. Both, I guess, could loosely be described as erotic thrillers.

But I would say that there's a Category 1 ET: reasonably well-known director, big studio, theatrical release, recognizable Hollywood names. Sliver, Body Heat, Wild Orchid, Wild Things, Wild at Heart, Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, 9.5 Weeks, Color of Night. These are basically just moody or noir-ish movies that have three or six decently steamy sex scenes.

Your dad could have them in with the rest of the VHS tapes, filed between the Beverly Hills Cops and the Indiana Joneses. They're certainly racy, but they have too much plot and cinematography to be porn. If they had been porn, your dad would have hid them in a box under the 1988 tax return.

One might have watched these through only once, and thenceforward relied on skillful FFing and REWing to get you to the good parts. But you had to watch it through once, because before the Internet that was the only way to find the good parts.

Red Shoe Diaries and the softcore stuff that is currently on Cinemax in the "After Dark" category? Not even direct to video, but direct to cable. You have not heard of the actors, the director, or the studio in any non-erotic context. Those are Category 2 ETs. Current listing on Max Go includes "Bedroom Eyes," "The Deadly Pick Up," "High Heel Homicide," "Illicit Desires," on and on.

Last time I, um, checked, their ratio of exposition to sex scene (while nowhere near that of hardcore) is more regular. So if you were going to use it as wankage fodder, you would need to do far less work with the remote control to get to the steamy parts. It's probably about every 9-11 minutes. Which is, coincidentally, the average amount of time that a pay-per-view erotic movie is watched in hotel rooms.

The plots are of course ridic, and the stagey non-penetrative non-genital-showing sex just looks goofy. So they're pretty useless as porn (because it's so easy to get real porn), and they're also useless as movies (because they're so full of stupid).

CAVEAT: Some franchises - notably Poison Ivy - started out as Cat 1 and moved to Cat 2 over the course of the sequels. Maybe they're in a Cat 1 1/2.

I'm primarily concerned w Cat 1 tbh

thread is about cat ii iirc

brb about to post "a neurotic thriller" in the "rejected parody threads" thread

thread is about cat ii iirc

based on the original post, undoubtedly - however I will forcibly re-appropriate this thread for my own means cuz what am I gonna do, create another thread called Category 1 Erotic Thrillers?

body of evidence hasn't been mentioned itt! a real stinker of a film. a basic instinct copy where the relationship is between murder suspect and her defense lawyer, rather than murder suspect and cop.

madonna dropping hot wax on willem dafoe's genitalia is a real treat though

Ye Mad Puffin- Wild Orchid is by Zalman King, Who created Red Shoe Diaries and his work seems to go between the two categories you set (and there's probably a lot of stuff inbetween that space). Red Shoe Diaries had David Duchovny, Matt LeBlanc and Sheryl Lee.

Perhaps King gradually slid more firmly into the second category like Borowczyk did, but his stuff is very different.

Category I and II are actually a bit more mixed. Zalman King got a few auteur-like write-ups, and Some Call it Loving had some attention too.

There is a whole intersection where a handful of 70s auteur cinema with a lot of kink and sex is made: In the Realm of the Senses, W.R.: Mysteries of the Organism, Sweet Movie, Salo, The Night Porter, obv Last Tango...and then sorta gets...left, no one makes that anymore - and I reckon Cat II then kicks off a bit to almost fill that void in a strange way. I haven't fully mapped it out but I quite like someone to do a really wacky retro of both of these things - with maybe some Hollywood late 80s/early 90s to pad it out. xxp

Salo

idk if the intention of this movie was actually to be erotic, quite the opposite imo

Country where they're made probably quite an important factor.

"King gradually slid more firmly into..." - well, at least, simulated firm sliding

Most of those 70s films aren't exactly erotic but they use a take on sexuality to deliver some er truths and also map out a kind of fever dream. Which is what some of those Cat II erotic thrillers might have been doing, its been too long since I caught them on TV.

I always understood this genre as being one that grew entirely out of the success of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Blockbuster Video. With mega video stores needing more product, producers seized the opportunity to flood the market with cheap knockoffs with titles like Unnatural Discretion or Indecent Exposure and whatnot (I realize that Fatal Instinct was a spoof, but that was probably only because someone got to it before one of these other companies could). Sure, a lot of these films still went to theatres (at which point high-profile flops like Body of Evidence and The Colour of Night gradually succeeded in killing the genre off), but what went where was largely determined by star power: anything with Michael Douglas, Richard Gere, Sharon Stone, Kim Basinger or Rebecca DeMornay went to theatres, anything with Shannon Tweed or Michael Ironside or Barbara Carrera went straight to video.

("got to it" = the title)

"King gradually slid more firmly into..." - well, at least, simulated firm sliding

― Tone-Locrian (Ye Mad Puffin), Friday, 25 August 2017 20:32

I was going to stay that King straddles your two categories.

Most of those 70s films aren't exactly erotic but they use a take on sexuality to deliver some er truths and also map out a kind of fever dream.

I think a couple of interesting things were going on. One, of course, was the porno chic movement of the '70s, which infused everything. The other was relatively strict standards (self imposed or otherwise) about what could or could not be depicted in movies. The last might be how unavailable a lot of hardcore stuff was to most people, which tended to magnify the relatively minor (or more prominent) transgressions of Hollywood/mainstream stuff into at least appearing more titillating. Hence late night boobs, let alone softcore in general, felt more transgressive than it was. It was very sotto voce "hey man, did you see ..." or "did you hear about ... ?" As mentioned above, I think it's not a coincidence the genre (as such) more or less died off with the arrival of the internet.

By the way ... Black Swan=erotic thriller? The Piano?

Too prestige-y. When I think "high-toned erotic thrillers" I think of something like Boxing Helena.

I always understood this genre as being one that grew entirely out of the success of Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct and Blockbuster Video.

i think this is wrong? the 80s were the high-water mark of movies subtitled 'an erotic thriller' (a la the thread title) and if anything the movies you're talking about (cat 1 if you will) were an attempt to prestige-ify and supersize them for a bigger audience

Paul Verhoeven's early Dutch erotic thriller The Fourth Man.

And Black Widow is a good 80s example.

Whispers in the Dark is a bad 90s example.

xpost

Fair enough. I was too young in the 80s to be fully aware of these movies beyond seeing the boxes for The Postman Always Rings Twice (Nicholson/Lange version) and Body Heat or whatever in the video store. I just remember there being a surge of these post-FA, and then definitely post-BI, that definitely produced more films in this genre than anything prior to that time.

Never saw Whispers in the Dark, but Gene Siskel's description (on that year's "Worst Movies of the Year" show) of Alan Alda stumbling around a beach with a hook stuck in his neck (or was it head?) always stuck with me.

those were the peak, not the beginning

De Palma def a big part of this in America, "Dressed to Kill" etc.

Siskel liked Boxing Helena too iirc

This Letterboxd list that I just found does a credible and thorough job of trying to define the genre, I think.

jackpot!

Body Double is incredible, it transcends Wasson's leaden performance

― Οὖτις, Friday, August 25, 2017 3:30 PM (five hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

and yes it is ridiculous BUT - in the classic DePalma way - I think it is legit good, it goes so hard on the camp and exploitation that it achieves a weird fever-dream tone that is fantastic and genuinely disturbing.

― Οὖτις, Friday, August 25, 2017 3:32 PM (four hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

OTM. De Palma at his most unhinged, absurd and overblown in a totally compelling and entertaining way. Love it.

When the plot, acting, etc. are pointless, then what's the point? It looks like shit, too, just super bright sitcom lighting. What is there to actually enjoy in it? I mean, once the "Relax" video hits it sort of picks up, but it's practically over. As an exercise in style, maybe I could get behind it, but Ebert (and I assume others) took it seriously. And certainly Dressed to Kill took itself more seriously with similarly lurid themes, so why would he goof on himself? If your whole gist is hyper blown ott absurdity, then it's kind of lame to riff on yourself, though DePalma is nothing if not self-reflexive.

I do like, in theory, the idea of this one and Body Heat explicitly transgressing (relatively speaking) in the ways their direct inspirations could not but clearly wanted to. Nudity, language, blood. Don't know if that makes it better, but I have no doubt Hitchcock would have reveled in stuff so sleazy. On that other thread back when I think I made the same point about Basic Instinct.

Thief of Hearts! Wow, that takes me back to borrowing dad's Blockbuster card fer shurr.

I think the only thing I agree w you is that Wasson's acting is not great. But he's serviceable, and everything else going on around him is very rich imo.

xp

I don't know, I think it's actually not rich. Very shallow, very artificial, and very one person speaks one stilted line at a time. Had it better pulled off the Rear Window meets Vertigo mash-up I'd be more enthused.

I mean, many of the same problems I have with Basic Instinct so many years later, but at least BI undoubtedly looks awesome. It's well crafted.

https://d2ydh70d4b5xgv.cloudfront.net/images/4/9/michael-jackson-vinyl-lp-thriller-gatefold-original-picture-lyric-sleeve-46af1541e719b6e750644b478316ad5d.jpg
Erotic Thriller?

The whole panty-sniffing mall/beach chase scene in Body Double, and Wasson staying up late and seeing Holly Body on TV, and so on, felt so disconnected when I saw it again a few years ago, like hearing someone tell you a story about getting laid in a way that makes you cringe instead of relate.

Agree that somewhere in the second half it loses itself plotwise but that only adds to what Shakey said about the fever dream feel of it. Falls down this rabbit hole of unreality. It is (largely) an exercise in style, and that's not unsubstantial, particularly if we're talking about this genre and this director. Seeing BDP basically turn his movie riffing on his own oeuvre is total gleeful fun. It's way more interesting and less straight up than what you normally get with this genre.

Steven Bauer is hot as fuuuuk on THIEF OF HEARTS

OK, back to Body Double. I somehow completely forgot the ending, not just the climax, but the ending. So in general there is all sorts of wtf-ery going on in this movie. Why does the killer use a giant drill? Is the Relax video real or fantasy? Why when he meets Holly after their scene together minutes earlier is he suddenly pretending to be a slick producer? What was the killer's plan, anyway? Steal diamonds? Anyway, none of that matters, the movie is dumb, though we can debate if it's smart-dumb (though I would counter that Femme Fatale covers similar meta smart-dumb ground much, much better).

Anyway, the end. So Holly - not dead - is about to be buried alive (apparently running distance from an active police scene). The Indian dumps her in the hole, guy comes to rescue her, fights with the Indian, deus ex white dog, Indian goes into the reservoir, guy says he's here to help Holly and then ... cut to guy back to his job (which he wasn't fired from?) as a cheesy vampire, then over the credits he's made to freeze while they sub in the body double for the woman on the shower, and the rest of the credits roll over her exposed breasts. Like, wtf?

Learned this from wiki, though: "Slavitza Jovan, who appeared as Gozer the Gozerian in Ghostbusters the same year, 1984, briefly appears as a saleslady."

if anything the movies you're talking about (cat 1 if you will) were an attempt to prestige-ify and supersize them for a bigger audience

otm, I think a lot of it was mainstreaming stuff from '70s pulp and peepsploitation. So the Category II movies are kind of just returning the material to its cheap knockoff roots. In Category I, I love how many marquee names of the '80s made at least one erotic thriller. It's like all the aging rock stars making at least one New Wave album.

i think the two shifts totally go hand in hand: i absolutely associate the 80s new wavification of rock with the mainstreaming of the erotic thriller -- not least bcz the texture of music videos permeated the early 80s films in this vein (and vice versa)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWz9VN40nCA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZaPTELylZ1s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=69Z6MAK58gs

Excellent point but you have inexplicably omitted Sheena Easton's "Sugar Walls."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-Alq8rJIbo

"Self Control" definitely. All that exciting danger a liberated woman encounters.

Definitely why Dressed to Kill fits.

Also, random notes:

Jonathan Rosenbaum on Basic Instinct: https://m.chicagoreader.com/chicago/how-to-write-a-3-million-script/Content?oid=879416

Fatal Attraction is the all-time hit of this genre, isn't it?

And given how long it took Kubrick to make Eyes WideShut, he must've started in on it around that time.

So why did "In the Cut" end Meg Ryan's career? It's not great but she is not particularly terrible, nor is it by any means embarrassing. It's just a creepy little movie.

It didn't, iirc. I want to say the nail in the coffin - beyond just her entering upper middle age and getting written out of roles like Renee Russo on down - was a few years earlier, with "Proof of Life," when her affair with Russel Crowe (right?) got her branded the proverbial other woman and she became tabloid fodder. I suppose it's more accurate to say "In the Cut" killed Campion's Hollywood hopes.

It's well-made and directed imo

It was fine, iirc. But maybe, especially a few years post Piano, so anonymously 'erotic thriller" that no one cared. That's why I don't think it's Meg that it killed, any more than, say, Sliver killed Sharon Stone's career. Which, of course, it didn't, if you include "Casino," but that was an outlier. It feels that Sliver (like Jade did for Linda Fiorentino) really reduced her to a joke, even if Joe Eszterhas was ultimately to blame for both. And those plus Showgirls killed his career as much as it did theirs.

That is, all those movies took down their respective auteurs and while not necessarily their leads, they seemed to go down with them.

https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/From-Basic-Instinct-to-Showgirls-the-15865290.php

Adrian Lyne and Ben Affleck are bringing it back, baby

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_Water_(2021_film)

Further to which

Crazy gossip from work I can’t not share: at least one of the big streamers wants to bring back erotic thrillers. (Can’t wait for a new Adrian Lyne movie)

— Aaron Stewart-Ahn (@somebadideas) May 8, 2021

let's goooooooo

"I hear you're a...big streamer..."

from peppe the piss pig, a watersports-themed erotic thriller

straight to streaming erotic thrillers sounds like a goldmine

this is definitely Prime if it's true

hope all erotic thriller fans are aware of the delightful and odd podcast NIGHT TIME FOR ONE
http://nighttimeforone.com/

I love Prime it's such a weird chaotic mess, there are some crazy weird 70s movies down in the Prime basement

the voyeurs which has just popped up on amazon prime def looks like it’s got this vibe

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E-xndtrXsAAc2VH.jpg

C5 have been repeating Red Shoe Diaries, just in case you missed David Duchovny reading steamy letters to a dog.

read Michael Mohan as Michael Chabon at first

https://deadline.com/2021/12/ben-affleck-ana-de-armas-movie-deep-water-heading-to-streaming-1234890214/

Here we go:

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/you-must-remember-this-new-season-erotic-movies-1235107060/

Some films discussed in the season will be American Gigolo, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Fatal Attraction, as well as works from Steven Soderbergh and Brian De Palma, among others. Each episode will focus on one year, discussing movies and stars, with the season culminating in the year 1999, focusing on Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut.

hmm

no skerritt no credibility

I was actually just thinking about Jade the other day and Linda Fiorentino, surely one of the undisputed queens of the genre

Fast Times seems somewhat out of place there

Well the net seems to be cast a bit broadly, no bad thing.

last american virgin seems to fit the bill, as well