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

The Wachowskis did Bound immediately before The Matrix

It is terrible, the wachowskis are incompetent

that is not true!

Red Rock West was great. There were a good handful of neo-noir flicks at the time. RRW and Kill Me Again, with Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, stood out. Slam Dance was good one, too.

More germain to this thread, Caroline at Midnight is one I haven't seen on DVD yet. Mia Sara and "Wings"' Tim Daly.

basic instinct is essentially verhoeven remaking vertigo with a joe eszterhas script, it's awesome and upsetting. doesn't quite reach the peak of art trash that showgirls does but that's a precarious peak anyway

basic instinct is overdue a critical reassessment imo

Michael Douglas dancing in a disco in a sleeveless tank top is an indelible image

Whatever it's worth, it's an incredibly entertaining movie

boy is it ever, it’s all i can think about every time i see michael douglas in anything xp

Basic Instinct was not the best of the erotic thrillers but it really was some kind of apex. Verhoeven is a very intelligent guy making a fairly smart flick about an extremely stupid man who is basically seduced and destroyed by an obvious psychopath because he decides the sex is going to be worth it.

Michael Douglas is quite good, he takes his Black Rain and Fatal Attraction roles, adds the dumb twist, a bit of Pacino in Cruising, and voila.

Sharon Stone is exceptional though, I mean it’s a very brave performance in a lot of ways (beyond the obvious) and she’s just alive and fully committed to it.

Good point about Stone. Makes one wonder why Sliver was so stiff and joyless in contrast.

*coughbillybaldwincough*

also: in basic instinct stone gets to play a playful, manipulative vamp with a murderous streak while in sliver she is a proto-anastasia steel with a sleek bob haircut and has to pretend to find the idea of billy baldwin jerking off in front of a bank of crt monitors irresistibly sexy

Speaking as a hopelessly cishet person, the appeal of most of these men is going to elude me. That said, merely the fact that Douglas was a sex symbol for most of my lifetime is still bewildering. I mean, he was kinda roguish and self-mocking in Romancing the Stone but otherwise? Gah.

in Sliver, they decided to cast Stone in the Michael Douglas type role. also the Billy Baldwin stuff is toothless because he's not even the killer, he's just a dopey voyeur.

My very Baptist dad took me and my little sister to Basic Instinct when we were kids. He didn't know it was a hard R type flick. Aside from the constant cringing, I remember being totally into it. "She's evil... she's brilliant!"

my podcast is doing 9 1/2 weeks of erotic thrillers curated by ilxor Mandee

She picked some good ones. Animal Instincts is a cuck cop movie.

Speaking as a hopelessly cishet person, the appeal of most of these men is going to elude me. That said, merely the fact that Douglas was a sex symbol for most of my lifetime is still bewildering. I mean, he was kinda roguish and self-mocking in Romancing the Stone but otherwise? Gah.

― ~ cows come home (Ye Mad Puffin), Thursday, June 21, 2018 1:24 PM (one hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Pop Falling Down into the VCR and just try to refrain from pawing yourself.

The one where he's married to Gwyneth is the most ridiculous example

wow i do not remember making this poll

a perfect murder

something like that anyway = xpost

xxpost What about that show where he was married to Karl Malden? I didn't buy that at all.

Also, Romancing the Stone was one of my favorite movies as a kid and I'm sure it impacted my ideas of romance and stuff and he was hot in that. He pulled up to her fucking apartment in NY on a yacht wearing the damn alligator on his feet. That is a badass move if I've ever seen one.

Falling Down is great.

But not in a erotic way, mind.

the men in these movies are rarely appealing imo

Bruce Willis in Color of Night is super blechhh just a couple years after being super cute in Moonlighting.

Is it the case that yr genuinely handsome doodz (Clooneys and whatnot) tend not to appear in erotic thrillers? Is this by accident or by design?

z-post yeah but he did go full frontal in the color of night

it was more of a side-frontal iirc

why am i debating bruce willis’ dingus on the internet

I guess because it's frowned upon in the workplace.

luv2frown at bruce willis’ dingus with my co-workers

their characters are pretty gross most of the time, probably keeps the good looking quality actors away

Whispers in the Dark ftw

Also used to recommend Fear all the time, then watched it again and was wholly embarrassed to have done so.

fear is an amazing, embarrassing movie

Generally, all the characters in erotic thrillers are gross or messed up... they're like the erotic side of noir.

To find the women appealing, you'd have to have an unhealthy attraction to danger and stupidity. Which is sort of the point with a lot of these movies.

there is not a (real) kathleen turner thread, so

this is great: http://www.vulture.com/2018/08/kathleen-turner-in-conversation.html

Do you have sympathy for actors who choose differently?

Certainly in terms of film, there is intense pressure to repeat successful characters. I’ll give you an example, but you mustn’t include her name. [Very famous Hollywood actress] has played the same role for 20 years. She even looks pretty much the same. She’s probably one of the richest women out there, but I would shoot myself if I were like that, only giving people what they expect.

my guess is Mariska Hargitay (who has only played herself or Olivia Benson in the past twenty years except for two small roles)

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/erotic-movies-ranked-worst-to-best/

99% thrillers, obv. (why are so many erotic movies thrillers??)

because if you add a thriller element you can say it's a dark exploration of the human psyche etc and so it has an alibi of semi-respectability, while if you make a happy sexy movie there's no fig leaf for the perving?

I've always found it weird too because dark explorations of the human psyche are kind of a turn-off

The Crush got slept on in this poll.

SHOWGIRLS (1995) 23% #127

lol bye

Spoilers.

It's not all that erotic, but I took a second look at The Mean Season last night (1985, Kurt Russell/Mariel Hemingway). I recently posted about how good The Grey Fox was on another thread; the Lightbox guy who introduced it talked a bit about Phillip Borsos's career, how he left Hollywood after The Mean Season because he was fed up, and how the movie was quite good.

It's not. It's okay for the first half, starts to get worse, and then the last 15 minutes are terrible. All through the film, the killer (who's in contact over the phone with journalist Kurt Russell) is shot so you can't see his face; it seems to be tipping you off that he's one of two people close to Russell, either his editor or the photographer who works alongside him, and that he's trying to teach Russell a lesson about journalists who gain fame through grisly crime. Suddenly they decide to show him; all the earlier subterfuge had no point at all. And then the killer (Richard Jordan) tries to do some actual acting, and he's awful. Russell (who I almost always like) and Hemingway aren't much better.

im all for the big reveal being that the killer is random more of that

Has anyone seen Night Train to Venice? I only recently became aware of it - 90’s gothic-erotic thriller involving Neo-Nazis, featuring Hugh Grant, Malcolm McDowell, and Nazi-era German star Kristina Söderbaum. It looks entertainingly batshit but every review I’ve seen basically says “you’d think this would be fun but it’s just awful and boring.”