'An erotic thriller'

"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.