Scissors (1991)

In 1992 Sharon Stone became, overnight, the hottest property in Hollywood thanks to Basic Instinct. She seemed set for a glittering career, which didn’t happen to the extent one would have expected. She made some interesting movies in the 90s but apart from Basic Instinct they were not loved by the critics. Scissors, made a year before Basic Instinct, is one those critically unloved movies. Some of these movies were in fact very very good but once the critics turn against you there’s not much you can do.

Perhaps the problem is that some of her most notable 90s movies were about sex. They were to varying extent erotic thrillers. That always makes mainstream critics nervous, and often brings out their natural snarkiness. They do not entirely approve of erotic thrillers.

Scissors starts off very promisingly, creating unease on several different levels. Angie Anderson (Sharon Stone) almost gets raped in the elevator of her apartment building. That’s obviously unsettling to the viewer but there are other things vey early on that unsettle us. When we first see Angie she is dressed a bit oddly. She is dressed shabbily but we find out that she is not poor. She looks a bit like a refugee from the Summer of Love.

She collects dolls. There’s nothing inherently abnormal about a grown woman collecting dolls. It’s a not uncommon feminine hobby. But Angie seems to be obsessive about it. The dolls sleep on her bed. She sleeps on the couch. We see her looking at her naked breasts in the mirror and she does so in such a way to suggest that she’s a woman not quite comfortable in her own skin, and perhaps not quite comfortable with her sexuality.

She is rescued from the attempted rape by another tenant, Alex Morgan (Steve Railsback). He’s an actor. He shares an apartment with his wheelchair-bound brother Cole. They both seem a bit too tightly wrapped. Not overtly creepy, but just a tiny bit unsettling.

Then we find out that Angie is a virgin. Not by choice but through fear.

Cole Morgan is a painter. One look at his paintings is enough to convince us that he has a few issues with women. Then he shows Angie one particularly painting. She’s disturbed, and so are we.

So we have all sorts of disturbing provocative elements and what’s nice is that we know they’re important but we can’t yet see exactly how they’re going to fit together.

There are other characters who are also perhaps a little ambiguous. There’s Alex’s bitter ex-girlfriend Nancy Leahy (Vicki Frederick). There’s her psychiatrist, Dr Carter (Ronny Cox). Angie might have a slight emotional fixation on him. There’s Dr Carter’s ambitious politician wife.

And then there’s Billy (who might be someone from her childhood), and Richard Bailey (her new employer). There’s mystery surrounding both of them.

Angie sees her attacker again. Or she thinks she does.

This is a subjective movie. We see things from Angie’s point of view, and maybe her judgments are not always reliable. And her sexual hangups can cause her judgments about men to be dubious.

Then things get really strange. Now Angie is in real trouble.

This is not a Hitchcock-style suspense movie. Hitchcock always maintained that suspense is achieved by giving the audience information that the protagonist doesn’t have. In Scissors by contrast we only know what Angie knows. It’s more of a mystery thriller.

The production design is superb.

Steve Railsback handles his dual role rather well. I loved Sharon Stone in what was a very demanding role. She has to keep us guessing about this woman. The other performers are fine but this is a movie that is going to stand or fall depending entirely on Sharon Stone’s performance and she delivers the goods.

This is an erotic thriller in the sense that sex does to a large extent drive the plot and provider the character motivations but there are no sex scenes and only one brief topless scene. The violence (and there’s not much of it) is similarly mostly implied. There are no geysers of blood in this movie.

What it does have is a very disturbing atmosphere and most all a nice sense of uncertainty about whether we’re seeing reality or Angie’s distorted view of reality, or possibly there are things that exist only in her mind. Those questions are left unresolved up to the end. And the ending is very neat. I like this ending a lot. This is a very underrated movie and it’s highly recommended. And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

I’ve also reviewed Sharon Stone’s other much-maligned and very underrated 1993 erotic thriller Sliver.