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

hahahah that's amazing

Wild Things is pretty out there but Color of Night is BONKERS

I am now a proud owner of a copy of Wild Things, found a DVD for a buck at AmVets. I made my wife watch it because she'd never seen it and she agreed it was quality pulp. So much fun.

I saw a preview screening of Wild Things with a packed theatre of college students, the perfect venue.

Damn, don't get it...Jade is a good example of what I mean. New copies sell on Amazon (Canada) for between $100-$600. Ten years ago, you would have found it any flea market or thrift shop for nothing. '90s erotic thrillers are turning into the 13th Floor Elevators and Chocolate Watchband albums of a different universe.

There are new DVD copies of Jade on Ebay for $20. Amazon always has a range of crazy listings, for whatever reason - people using it as a placeholder, people taking a flier, people using automated repricing that glitches when supply is low.

I always check eBay, and you're right, things are cheaper there. It's still bad if you're in Canada--$40-50 by the time you pay shipping and exchange. I just wouldn't pay that much for any DVD, least of all a junky thriller. Once this thing ends, I'll back to scouring thrift stores and such, and it'll turn up before long.

sell on Amazon (Canada) for

If they aren't completed listings, they're not selling for that price. It's literally the equivalent of an op shop putting a $200 sticker on a Beatles LP.

Color of the Night: staggeringly, monumentally awful. I really didn't know much going in. "Richard Rush? Oh, he directed The Stunt Man--that's supposed to be pretty good." About half an hour in, I started to wonder if it won any Razzies (not particularly meaningful, except maybe as confirmation of something you're sitting there thinking yourself). It did--worst picture--and had a bunch of other nominations. Including one that gave away the supposed big twist. Not sure how to take the two votes above. I didn't find it Ed Wood funny or anything--I derisively laughed a few times.

Bad-film aficionado Nathan Rabin wrote quite a funny piece on that. My personal remembrance of the film is only that it was playing at the only cinema in Peterborough the last time I was there.

Oh, no doubt. It's a really terrible movie, but I can't quite imagine a world that doesn't include it.

Its awfulness is as clemenza says: monumental. The low-rent-Shyamanliness of the OmG TwIsT EnDInG is impressively bad.

Even the sex - which seemed rather racy at the time - seems bad in retrospect.

But just the fact that it exists - that a whole bunch of people heard the pitch or read the script or whatever, and said "wow, sounds great" - is just kind of impressive.

I think I felt most sorry for Rubén Blades--talk about a thankless role (which I'd like to believe would never happen in a studio film today; probably not true). Lance Henriksen and Kevin J. O'Connor quite awful too. Brad Dourif and Leslie Ann Warren didn't embarrass themselves. Willis and Jane March...Willis was sometimes okay and sometimes painfully over-the-top. I've never seen Jane March in anything else, so I don't know if she's any kind of actress. You wouldn't want to answer that question with this as your sole evidence.

I bought a copy of Chloe at a thrift store today. Wikipedia: "Chloe is a 2009 erotic thriller film directed by Atom Egoyan..." I find that funny in much the same way as this famous bit.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1CNyzdmXhe0

It's probably closer to the mark generically than, say, The Adjuster.

Clemenza, prior to Color of Night, my primary association with Lesley Ann Warren was a 1965 TV version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Cinderella.

So, young Puffin had a somewhat confused reaction...

Playing God--paired with Color of Night on a budget Mill Creek Blu-ray--not a whole lot better.

I remember Tarantino saying he saw The Color of Night and skipped Natural Born Killers the weekend both opened.

gotta support your bois

Chloe is a riot.

I thought this might be chiming in on the recent discussion of hollywood being worryingly sexless in the recent past. Has this been in any of our threads?

Are you referring to this (fantastic) article?: https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/

Lots to discuss there, but I am also wondering if there is a more appropriate thread in which to do so.

Yeah, it's funny that blew up after everyone went nuts at her for shitting on fanfiction

It's been translated into a couple of other languages now

i'd guess one of the main factors in the production of olde tyme horndog films was the relative difficulty (& social opprobrium) of acquiring quality smut back in the dark ages. whereas now once you're old enough to type naughty words into google without a parent hovering nearby the entirety of human sexual ingenuity is available in 4k surround sound smellovision, and if you're kind of a scumbag you can pretty easily find nudes hacked from celebrities' phones. erotic thrillers pale in comparison. the big money'd be in films for the whole family that kids will drag parents to twenty times, and you can't have titties in those or the children will get possessed by satan and then good luck because it's fountains of blood vomit and locusts scourging the fields, nobody's got time for that

which bland & obvious normie take has probably been expressed more succinctly several times upthread, but the thread is long and i am lazy, you're welcome

oh, and the international market. china doesn't want sexy sex in their movies.

first response otm

im sure its a great article but i need to take a deep breath and count to 10 after this opening sentence: "When Paul Verhoeven adapted Starship Troopers in the late 1990s, did he know he was predicting the future? The endless desert war, the ubiquity of military propaganda, a cheerful face shouting victory as more and more bodies pile up?"

GOSH YEAH I WONDER

that article sucks ass ftr

good quality actually sexy erotica is as rare as it ever was imo

Karina Longworth has a new package of You Must Remember This podcasts that focuses on erotic thrillers. The first batch out this spring is called Erotic 80s, to be followed (after a summer hiatus) in the fall by Erotic 90s. The first episode, which sets the scene by covering the porno chic of the '70s and the rating system, is up now. She promises eventually to deal with the "sexless Hollywood" phenomenon of today.

Great episode and start for the series for sure -- the focus is on Deep Throat and Last Tango In Paris for that.

Should Angel Heart have been on this list?

Cool! I haven't listened to her in a while, but she is great.

So far so good on this series.

The non-anglo film doesn't really go anywhere much for me in this list but it reads nice enough

https://www.vulture.com/article/best-erotic-thrillers-streaming-netflix-hbo-showtime.html

Rating Jade over the Last Seduction is kind of a challop

Loving this season of the Longworth podcast. The episode on Bo Derek is both enlightening (to someone who was an infant at the peak of her fame) and infuriating (to someone when knew John Derek was a piece of shit but maybe just not how much of a piece of shit). Longworth’s comment about 10 being all but forgotten today was curious; I had assumed it still held a reasonably “classic” status, but when I looked I couldn’t find it either on any of my streaming services or at my local library.

Thanks for thr alert.

yeah am enjoying the series so far, learning a lot.

re the poll, i had the deep misfortune of seeing Color of Night in the theatre. My roommate wanted to see it & he paid so i went along for the free movie. Bleuchhhhh no free movie is worth that

i would have voted Sea of Love. i think it’s underrated. it’s a great thriller & pacino & barkin have such great chemistry. i think Richard Price wrote it iirc?

Listening to the second episode of the podcast. It's interesting, but Longworth's delivery is weird; every other sentence, she'll pronounce an ordinary English word like she just learned it.

That’s canonical longworth

My theory is she over-pronounces to compensate for natural under-pronunciation

I don’t know what her pronunciation deal is, but I know there’s no excuse for it. You can’t mispronounce “Lovelace” 100x and expect us to take you seriously

Perhaps this podcast is not for you

That said, focusing on 10 is interesting, and something I wouldn’t have thought of, but it might make some kind of sense. I do remember when that film came out. It’s erotic but in no way a thriller. Yet it may have paved the way for the genre.

The delivery is … pretty unerotic, fwiw.

Karina Longworth treats Jagged Edge as a kind of forgotbuster, which actually makes sense--I'm old enough to remember my parents going to see it (I would catch it on cable some years later) and the still-hilarious controversy over the ending*, but from my Letterboxd feed, it looks like the film is now unknown to most people who were not alive and/or paying attention to film in 1985. The film's status rather perfectly reflects its quality, I think: a solid, enjoyable thriller (albeit one with a sloppy conclusion) that needed the hand of a Brian De Palma or even an Adrian Lyne to distinguish it, but instead got the guy who did Return of the Jedi. Oh, and Robert Loggia somehow got a Best Supporting Actor nomination out of the whole thing.

*on that ending, fast forward to the last segment of this (SPOILER-y!) Siskel & Ebert episode if you don't know but care about what I'm talking about: https://siskelebert.org/?p=3635

This was big news in my household, if only because my older sister and mum were majorly crushing on Jeff Bridges at the time

Bridges is definitely at his hottest in Jagged Edge.

This plus Fatal Attraction/Someone to Watch Over Me/Cape Fear all seem to merge into a single blob in my head even though they’re very different films

I remember my folks seeing Jagged Edge and catching the end with my mom once when it hit cable the following year, and it was legit huge indeed. But when Karina teased Glenn C would be featured in discussions of two movies in the series, I went "Well Fatal Attraction...wait, what's the other one?" and absolutely had no idea it would be Jagged Edge until the episode hit, and hadn't thought about it in DECADES, though the poster immediately came to mind after the mention. Truly a memory hole of a movie. (Marquand, said ROTJ director, really had a weird career in retrospect -- he followed up said Star Wars entry having gotten the job with Eye of the Needle with a romantic melodrama with Karen Allen, Until September, then Jagged Edge, then Dylan's Hearts of Fire! Then the poor bastard dies of a stroke.)

Poor guy!

Maybe it was different in a pan and scan vhs version but I don’t recall the last shot being very confusing?