'An erotic thriller'

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.