A Woman Scorned (1993)

A Woman Scorned is one of Shannon Tweed’s 90s direct-to-video erotic thrillers. It’s one of several movies that she did for Andrew Stevens. Stevens directed and he also plays the male lead.

This movie is not to be confused with the 1992 movie of the same title. It's the 1993 movie with Shannon Tweed that you need to look for.

The title is perhaps misleading. The heroine is not actually scorned in the sense that you might expect. She’s not rejected, but she is humiliated.

This is a genre hybrid. It’s a female revenge movie but it’s also a psycho female movie. The greatest of all psycho female movies is of course Pretty Poison (1968) and Tuesday Weld’s performance in that film will never be equalled. Having said that, Shannon Tweed has no reason to be ashamed of her performance in A Woman Scorned.

Truman Langley (Daniel McVicar) is a hard-driving hyper-ambitious business executive and is close to achieving his goal - he is about to be made a partner. He is a sleazy low-life creep who will do anything to advance his career, even to whoring out his wife Patricia (Shannon Tweed) in order to close a deal. Truman thinks this is OK because he’s a winner. He’s about to find out that he is actually a loser. He misses out on the partnership. The form brings in an outsider, Alex Weston (Andrew Stevens). And worse still, Truman is demoted. His career in ruins, he shoots himself.

Patricia is determined to get revenge. She wants revenge on Mason Wainwright (Stephen Young), the creep to whom her husband whored her out. No-one could blame her for waning revenge on Wainwright. He knew when he had sex with her that she had only agreed very reluctantly under extreme emotional blackmail from her husband.

But Patricia also wants revenge on Alex Weston. She blames Alex for beating out Truman for the partnership and thereby causing his death but in fact Alex had had no idea that he was inadvertently wrecking Truman’s career. Alex is basically a nice guy and a decent guy. He’s a family man. He would never have treated a woman the way Truman treated Patricia. Swearing revenge on Alex is crazy and wrong. And Patricia swears vengeance on Alex’s family as well, which is both crazy and evil.

So this is an intriguing twist on the female revenge movie. This is a woman who has picked the wrong targets for her revenge.

The truth is that Patricia, after her husband’s death, is no longer quite sane. One of the things I really love about this movie is that this is made wholly believable. Patricia has endured sexual humiliation engineered by her own husband. She has then had her husband blow his brains out. She is also facing financial ruin. Truman’s suicide voided his life insurance policy. All he has left Patricia are debts. But her emotions are very very conflicted. Despite everything, she loved her husband. Perhaps he had been a good man once and having fallen in love with him then she cannot stop loving him.

She is also conflicted about that sexual humiliation. Had she been raped she might have dealt with it. But she consented, which left her feeling like a whore.

She is dealing with so many confused and contradictory emotions that we can readily believable that her mind might well give way under the strain.

Andrew Stevens is fine as Alex, as is Kim Morgan Greene as Alex’s wife Marina.

But everything hinges on Shannon Tweed’s performance and she acquits herself extremely well. When she has to convey Patricia’s combination of horror, humiliation, disgust and self-disgust and when she has to get across Patrica’s tangled feelings towards her husband she does so effectively. When she embarks on her campaign of revenge Patricia is herself playing a part and Tweed makes sure we’re always aware that every emotion that Patricia displays is calculated.

We slowly come to realise that Patrica’s revenge plans are much more complicated, fiendish and devious than we expected.

Another thing I like is that whereas in most female revenge movies (including such excellent examples as Thriller: A Cruel Picture and Hannie Caulder) the woman has to learn to use a man’s weapons in this movie Patricia uses a woman’s weapons. This is to be a woman’s revenge.

The sex scenes all advance the plot and they all tell us something important about the characters. When Patricia seduces Robey she gets a great deal of pleasure out of it, but it’s clear that her physical pleasure comes from the psychological buzz of knowing that she in complete control and that she has him dancing to her tune. For the first ytime since her husband’s death Patricia is in control. It might even be the first time in her life she has experienced the pleasure of such total domination. In the scene in the poolroom the guy thinks he’s taking her violently but doesn’t realise that in fact she is the one taking him violently.

The impressive screenplay, by Karen Kelly and Barry Avrich, is packed with moral ambiguity and it has some nice twists. Patricia does evil but she is convinced that she is a righteous Avenging Angel. Having made that decision in her own mind she never questions it.

This is a much better and much cleverer movie than you might be expecting. In fact it compares quite favourably with major studio erotic thrillers of the 80s and 90s. Highly recommended.

I’ve only seen one of the other movies Miss Tweed did with Andrew Stevens, Illicit Dreams, a movie that has some fine moments and good ideas although the ending lets it down.

The Howling (1981)

Joe Dante’s The Howling was released in 1981.

The 80s was a mini-golden age of werewolf movies. It’s not hard to see why. There had been great werewolf movies in the past (The Wolf Man, Hammer’s The Curse of the Werewolf) but the problem had aways been that the look of the werewolves was so disappointing. They looked like guys who were just badly in need of a haircut and a shave. During the gothic horror boom of the 60s and early 70s werewolves were largely ignored. They would have looked too lame.

But by the 80s practical effects and makeup effects had become incredibly sophisticated. This was before CGI. CGI wasn’t needed. By the 80s old school effects could produce a genuinely convincing and terrifying werewolf. The result was movies like An American Werewolf in London (1980), The Company of Wolves (1984) and later, in the 90s, Wolf. And The Howling.

Interestingly enough werewolf movies would soon once more disappear into oblivion. Werewolves are the kinds of creatures that are always going to look lame done with CGI. CGI cannot capture that visceral feel that 80s special effects achieved so well. In The Howling you can almost smell the musky wild animal scent of the werewolves.

The Howling starts off as a scuzzy crime thriller. Newsreader Karen White (Dee Wallace) is helping the police to catch a psycho killer. He’s a media-obsessed psycho killer so he’s made contact with her. They arrange a meeting. Karen will be safe. The cops will be watching. Of course the cops, being cops, make an unholy mess of things. Karen finds herself trapped in an adult bookstore with a crazed killer. She is lucky to escape alive. The killer is gunned down by the cops.

The police have been getting advice from renowned psychiatrist Dr George Waggner (Patrick Macnee). You have to remember that this was the 80s, when people still took psychiatrists and the media seriously.

Karen is badly shaken up. Dr Waggner advises her to go his therapeutic retreat, The Colony. Her husband Bill (Christopher Stone) can accompany her. It’s in the middle of the wilderness. Karen is sceptical. Like any sane person she knows that the countryside is much more dangerous than the city.

The Colony is full of weirdos, perverts, burned-out hippies, drunks, druggies and assorted losers. Karen is not very happy. She’s even less happy when she sets eyes on Marsha (Elisabeth Brooks) and we can’t blame her. One look at Marsha and you know she’s a sexy dangerous bad girl who’s probably a firecracker in bed. Karen is not reassured when she’s told that Marsha is being treated by Dr Waggner for nymphomania.

And Marsha is already casting lustful glances at Karen’s husband. Karen suspects that Marsha will soon be tearing BiIl’s trousers off and that he probably won’t put up much resistance.

Meanwhile Karen’s media friends Chris and Terry have been finding out some disturbing things relating to that now deceased psycho killer.

And that’s before Karen finds out that the woods around The Colony are crawling with werewolves.

This was a fairly low-budget movie (made for $1.1 million dollars). When it was completed Dante realised that the special effects were hopelessly inadequate but luckily was able to pry some more money out of the backers and do some reshoots. The final results are quite impressive.

It’s an example of good low-budget filmmaking. If you only have one werewolf suit but you know what you’re doing you can convince the audience that there are lots of werewolves.

The gore level is moderate.

There’s only one sex scene and it’s great - it convinces us that this man and woman are no longer bound by civilised restraints. They’re werewolves and they’re coupling like wild animals.

The acting is mostly good. I liked Patrick Macnee. He’s playing a psychiatrist so he’s supposed to be weird and creepy, and he leaves us guessing as to whether this is just a regular creepy psychiatrist or a totally evil one.

Elisabeth Brooks as Marsha is not just mysterious, dangerous and sexy but also gives off some seriously wild vibes. She’s like a she-cat on heat. And she looks terrific.

The most interesting thing about his movie is how long it take for the werewolf elements to kick in. First it makes us think it’s a gritty sleazy urban crime drama, then it makes us think it’s a psychos in the woods movie. Don’t worry. Once the werewolf thing gets going there’s plenty of it.

The best thing is that this really feels like a drive-movie. In the best possible way. The Howling is highly recommended.

It looks great on Blu-Ray.

The first of the sequels, Howling II: Your Sister Is a Werewolf, has little connection to the first film but it’s great cinema trash.

Blind Date (1984)

The first thing to be noted here is that this review concerns the 1984 Nico Mastorakis-directed Blind Date, not the 1987 Blake Edwards movie with the same title.

Mastorakis has made movies in both his native country, Greece, and in the United States. Blind Date was shot in Greece.

Mastorakis was one of those guys who figured out early on that the secret to making money out of modestly-budgeted movies was to get involved in the production side so he set up his own production company. On most of his movies he’s the producer, director and screenwriter.

In Blind Date we are introduced to Jonathon Ratcliff (Joseph Bottoms), a young American now working for an advertising agency in Athens. At the office he meets Claire (Kirstie Alley). They sleep together. Everything seeks to go fine in the bedroom. Jonathon seems like a fairly regular guy with no particular hang-ups.

Except that there was that girl at the photo shoot. He thought he knew her. Or at least he thought she was a girl he knew in the past.

Something terrible happened to that girl in his past. But it wasn’t his fault. That’s what he was told.

And then we see Jonathon with a pair of binoculars, watching people through their windows. He appears to be a Peeping Tom. Which is a bit odd. He has a hot girlfriend. And she apparently has no complaints about his performance in bed. Guys with hot girlfriends and normal sex lives are not usually peepers.

Then we find him watching a young couple making out in a car. The guy spots him and chases him. That’s when the accident happens. The bizarre and unlikely accident that leaves him blind. So we have a Peeping Tom who is now blind. I think they call that irony.

And there has been a brutal murder, of a woman.

There are some hints that things may not be as straightforward as they appear. We’re not sure what is really going on with Jonathon. Maybe it’s not simple voyeurism but something to do with his obsession with the woman from his past. We have no idea if Jonathon is actually involved in anything genuinely disturbing or violent. Or if he ever has been. All we have are hints that could point in those directions but we’re aware that perhaps we’re being led up the garden path.

Another murder takes place. We still have no clear indication that this has any connection whatsoever with Jonathon.

What we have here is a setup for an erotic thriller, or perhaps a slasher movie. And then the cyberpunk elements kick in. Jonathon is given bionic vision. It’s like very crude 80s video game graphics. He cannot see any details at all. He cannot identify individual people. But he can now get around. The problem is that he will find himself in dangerous situations where he needs to see details. He needs to be able to identify people’s faces. It’s a nifty thriller plot mechanic.

It’s incredibly interesting that Mastorakis was playing around with cyberpunk concepts in 1984, at a time when cyberpunk was in its infancy. The movie Blade Runner had established the cyberpunk aesthetic but content-wise it was not full-blown cyberpunk. Wililam Gibson’s short story Burning Chrome had been published in 1982 but it was not until 1984 that his novel Neuromancer put cyberpunk on the map. But here we have Mastorakis dealing with at least some of the themes of full-blown cyberpunk in a movie released early in 1984, a movie that was presumably already in production before Mastorakis could have had any opportunity to read Neuromancer.

Mastorakis did something similar a few years later, in his excellent In the Cold of the Night (1990). That movie starts out as an erotic thriller with neo-noir overtones and then veers into cyberpunk territory.

Mastorakis was very good at choosing locations that provided production value without spending much money. He uses Athens rather well. This is not tourist Athens. There are no shots of the Parthenon. This is the Athens of the wealthy middle class but it’s still clear that this is a movie that is not set in LA or London or Rome or any other familiar thriller locations. There’s just that very subtle hint of the exotic.

Joseph Bottoms is an adequate lead. He is ambiguous, which is what was needed. It’s not a demanding role for Kirstie Alley but she is very good.

There’s decent suspense and the action scenes are made interesting by the fact that at times we’re seeing things through Jonathon’s primitive video game graphic vision.

Blind Date is an enjoyable thriller made much more interesting by the proto-cyberpunk touches. Highly recommended.

The Shadow (1994)

The Shadow, released in 1994, was one of several 1990s attempts to kickstart superhero franchises. Other notable attempts were The Rocketeer, Dick Tracy and The Phantom. All these attempts failed which is a pity because they’re pretty good movies.

The Shadow began as a pulp magazine hero was was featured in several movies in the late 1930s.

The 1994 movie wisely adopts for a period setting although it looks more 1940s than 1930s.

The movie gives us a backstory. Lamont Cranston (Alec Baldwin) is a very nasty American bandit operating somewhere in central Asia. He ends up as a prisoner in a monastery where he learns to deal with his inner demons. 

He returns to America to become a force for good as a masked crime-fighter.

He has one super-power. He can cloud men’s minds. This gives him virtual invisibility - others are hypnotised into not seeing him.

Now he’s up against Shiwan Khan (John Lone), a descendant of Genghis Khan who has some similar hypnotic powers. Shiwan aims at world conquest. He plans to get hold of an atomic bomb. Such things do not yet exist (we assume the setting is the United States just before the Second World War) but Shiwan knows of a couple of eccentric genius scientists who may be able to invent one.

Lamont Cranston has one possibly useful ally. Margo Lane (Penelope Ann Miller) is the daughter of one of the crazy scientists but she appears to have telepathic powers. Or at least she has the ability to make telepathic contact with Lamont Cranston.

I have a few reservations about this movie but they’re more matters of personal taste than actual criticisms.

Alec Baldwin is seriously lacking in charisma and charm. But given that it was decided to make Lamont Cranston a very dark tortured character constantly battling the darkness within him his casting works reasonably well. He does the tragic brooding ominous thing very well and overall his casting works.

I’m not sure that Penelope Ann Miller has the necessary star power. Margo Lane is more than just the hero’s love interest. She becomes his active ally. This movie needs a really strong female lead, especially with such a taciturn leading man. Compared to Jennifer Connelly in The Rocketeer, Catherine Zeta-Jones in The Phantom or even Madonna in Dick Tracy she’s a little bland. I can’t help thinking of several other major female stars of the period who might have injected bit more life into the character. Nicole Kidman perhaps. Or Sharon Stone (who had demonstrated in King Solomon’s Mines that she could be a delightful adventure heroine). On the other hand Penelope Ann Miller is pretty, she’s likeable, she looks very good in period costumes and hairstyles and there’s nothing actually wrong about her performance.

At times the visuals are just slightly too reminiscent of Tim Burton’s Batman, but I must admit that The Shadow does the 1940s urban gothic thing very effectively.

Viewers unaware of The Shadow’s long pop culture history were likely to dismiss this movie as a mere Batman rip-off. In fact The Shadow as a character pre-dates Batman by a decade.

The biggest problem with these 90s attempts to launch new franchises was that these movies were horrendously expensive. It was not enough for them to do well at the box office. To justify a franchise they needed to be gigantic hits, which they weren’t.

Australian-born Russell Mulcahy was a solid choice to direct. One of this movie’s great strengths is that it doesn’t suffer from the problems that afflict so many movies of recent decades - bloat and poor pacing. It keeps powering along and there’s always something happening.

The Shadow is heavy on the urban gothic noir vibe but with moments influenced by old Hollywood musicals and even (as Penelope Ann Miller quite correctly points out in her interview) some nice screwball comedy touches. The dynamics of the Lamont Cranston-Margo Lane relationship are structured in a very screwball comedy way.

It’s very special effects-heavy but they are done extremely well. There’s some CGI (CIG was around but still in its infancy) but Mulcahy preferred practical effects and that’s mostly what we get. It really is a great-looking movie.

The Shadow delivers dazzling visuals, thrills and adventure. That’s more than enough to keep me happy. Highly recommended.

Truck Stop Women (1974)

Truck Stop Women might not be great cinema but it is great fun. 

I guess you could call this rednecksploitation, or maybe trucksploitation.

Anna (Lieux Dressler) runs a truck stop in New Mexico but she has a few sidelines going, such as a major truck hijacking racket. The muscle for her operation is provided by a bunch of cowboys. They’re fiercely loyal to Anna.

Anna’s truck stop is very popular because when a man has been driving his rig for days he needs a little relaxation. Anna’s girls provide that. They provide a full service.

Anna’s daughter Rose (Claudia Jennings) is running wild a bit and she’s going to cause some trouble.

The real trouble on the way is coming from a bunch of mobsters from out east. They represent a major syndicate. Anna has always kept her distance from the big boys of crime. Her truck hijacking racket and her brothel provide more than enough money to keep her happy. But maybe those big city mobsters are not going to leave her in peace.

She’s never had any problem with the local sheriff. He’s one of the brothel’s favourite customers.

There are actually two outsiders in town trying in different ways to muscle in on Anna’s territory. Smith and Rusty are vicious big city hoodlums and Smith is ambitious. They’re out-and-out bad guys.

Seago is also an out-of-town mobster. He’s on Anna’s side. Up to a point anyway. She does suspect that he may have plans to grab a sizeable chunk of her operation. Seago has a plan. Anna wants nothing to do with it because she has always avoided getting on the wrong side of the major syndicates but maybe she won’t have a choice.

The amusing thing is that the good guys (Anna and her cowboys and her whores) hardly qualify as good guys. Anna is after all running a small-scale organised crime operation. They’re not exactly solid citizens. But we’re immediately on their side because they’re the underdogs, they’re the little guy. And they love country music.

The acting is perfect for this type of movie. Nobody is taking this seriously as drama but they are doing their best to be fun. Lieux Dressler is magnificent. How did she not have a better career?

Claudia Jennings makes a splendid spoilt bad girl. It’s a finely judged subtle performance - she manages to keep us guessing until the end about which way Rose will end up jumping, and she manages to appear treacherous without overdoing it. Call me crazy if you like but based on this performance Claudia Jennings could have given acting lessons to some of the much bigger female stars of the time.

This is one of those movies that promises a bit more sleaze than it delivers but there’s still a healthy quantity of T&A.

And the music is great! This is real truck-driving music.

It’s easy to get smarmy about a movie like this but it’s an extremely well-crafted film. The pacing is perfect. The action scenes are excellent. There’s the right balance between a serious crime story and lighthearted trucking action and humour and titillation.

Trucksploitation was an actual genre and there were even big-studio productions. Truck Stop Women is a better film than any of the big-studio attempts. It delivers more entertainment value. And it makes no apologies for being a drive-in movie. Drive-in audiences liked trucks and they liked tits. This movie offers plenty of both but it also offers huge amounts of enjoyment.

On the audio commentary Kim Newman points out that the basic core plot is lifted straight from Mildred Pierce and he makes the daring suggestion that in some ways Truck Stop Women handles that core plot more effectively. I’m inclined to agree with him.

Truck Stop Women offers fistfights, gunfights, truck chases, boobs, laughs and country music. On one level it’s a lively enjoyable romp. But always lurking in the background is a serious human drama about mothers and daughters. It’s the performances of Claudia Jennings and Lieux Dressler that make this movie more than just a fun exploitation movie. It is a fun exploitation movie but it’s a rather good movie as well. And the ending is superbly done.

Truck Stop Women is highly recommended.

Runaway (1984)

Runaway is a 1984 science fiction film written and directed by Michael Crichton and, as he did in his classic Westworld, he’s once again dealing with robots running amok.

The setting is a world in which robots are everywhere. They do everything for us. They have not only taken over many jobs they also run our homes, cook dinner for us, look after our kids. What’s interesting is that there’s no attempt to give the movie a futuristic look. This is just the world of the 80s, but with lots of robots.

It’s quite possible that this movie would have had a bigger commercial impact if Crichton had had the kind of budget Ridley Scott had on Blade Runner and could have given us an uber-cool cyberpunk world. But perhaps that’s not what Crichton would have wanted. He’s more interested in the ideas than the visuals. He thought of himself as a writer of techno-thrillers rather than science fiction.

And this really is essentially a techno-thriller. The robots are not hyper-futuristic. They’re the sorts of industrial and domestic robots that seemed likely to be available in the very near future. They’re not humanoid. They look like mobile fax machines or advanced vacuum cleaners. They either look boring and innocuous or they look cute. That’s what makes them creepy and scary. They look harmless until they start trying to kill you.

But moviegoers want science fiction movies that look like science fiction movies. They want either spaceships or futuristic cityscapes (as in Logan’s Run and Blade Runner). They want uber-cool robots, like the Terminator ones. They want sci-fi coolness. Runaway doesn’t offer that. It’s a cop thriller with robots.

I like the lack of the obvious sci-fi trappings but audiences didn’t. Runaway flopped at the box office.

Sergeant Ramsey (Tom Selleck) is a cop and he’s on the squad that deals with malfunctioning robots. The Runaway Squad. This is a world in which robots are ubiquitous and everybody relies on them but the damned things just don’t work properly. Sometimes when they malfunction it’s inconvenient. Sometimes when they malfunction they kill people. And it’s a world in which people just seem to take all this for granted.

In other words it’s like today’s world. Total reliance on very cool technology that works some of the time. And can at any time decide to kill you.

Ramsey has one small problem - he suffers badly from vertigo. As you might expect the plot keeps requiring him to be in scary high places.

Ramsey has a new partner, Officer Karen Thompson (Cynthia Rhodes). She has a crush on him almost from the start.

A very ordinary domestic robot has just started chopping people up. The owner assures Ramsey that the robot has not been modified in any way (robots tend to turn dangerous when people try to modify them). But someone had definitely modified this robot. There’s a chip there that shouldn’t be there and the police experts don’t know what it does. But whatever it does is probably bad.

It becomes obvious that there’s a super-villain involved. His name is Luther and he’s played by Gene Simmons. Yes, that Gene Simmons. Frontman for the band KISS. He may not be the world’s greatest actor but he knows how to ooze crazed evilness.

Ramsey gets a break. He has Luther’s girl in custody. Her name is Jackie (Kirstie Alley). She knows something. She’s definitely a femme fatale type, she knows something important and Luther wants her back and not just because she’s a doll. She has something he needs. If Ramsey can find out what it is he’ll be ahead of the game but his problem is that Luther is a tech genius, he can hack into any system and he knows everything that Ramsey is doing.

Selleck is very good. It’s a much more low-key than in Magnum, P.I. - he’s a nice guy but a bit on the serious side. Kirstie Alley is fun as the sexy bad girl. Cynthia Rhodes is likeable. Gene Simmons is good but Luther’s limitation as a super-villain is that his plans are not particularly grandiose.

This was 1984 so the special effects are old school. Despite the robots this is not a movie that relies heavily on effects.

I like Runaway quite a bit for what it is - a low-key techno-thriller. Recommended.

The 101 Films Blu-Ray looks very good. There’s an audio commentary but it’s probably best to skip it.

In the Cold of the Night (1990)

In the Cold of the Night is a 1990 erotic thriller directed by and co-written by Nico Mastorakis. 

To me this seems to be very much in the style of 80s gialli, especially Nothing Underneath (1985) and Too Beautiful To Die (1988). There’s the same arty/media/fashion world background and the same aura of wealth, glamour, style, sex and decadence. And like Nothing Underneath it has hints of the paranormal.

Scott Bruin (Jeff Lester) is a fashion photographer. He’s rich. He likes women. Lately he’s been having very unsettling dreams. Dreams about murdering a woman. He doesn’t recognise the woman in the dreams. The dreams are becoming very disturbing. At one point he finds himself trying to strangle his bed partner for the night.

And sometimes the dreams come when he’s awake. His vision becomes blurred but he’s definitely awake. Or he thinks he’s awake.

Then he sees the girl’s face on a T-shirt. It’s the girl from his dream. The girl he keeps killing in his dreams.

Then he meets Kimberly (Adrianne Sachs). She rides a motorcycle. She rides it into his studio. Then she takes him to her house. Only it isn’t her house. She’s house-sitting. It’s a palatial mansion, currently on the market for a cool 12 million. She takes him to the house on her bike. She rides the motorcycle right into the bedroom.

And she’s ridden her way into his heart. The sex is great. She’s intelligent and amusing. There’s only one problem. Where did she go to when she got into that BMW? Is there something about her that he doesn’t know?

And he’s still dreaming about killing her. In fact he tries to kill her. She forgives him. It’s just one of those things. He’s probably stressed. She’s a broadminded girl.

Of course he has to follow her the next time she gets into that BMW. Scott doesn’t understand anything that is going on. He just knows that he’s in love with Kimberly.

There’s something strange happening here. Several possibilities will suggest themselves. Scott could be insane. There could be paranormal influences at work. Somebody might be trying to gaslight Scott.

So far the movie is a straightforward erotic thriller with some serious dashes of neo-noir. Then suddenly it doesn’t just change direction. Now it’s on a whole different highway. Every assumption that the viewer has made turns out to be wrong. Every assumption that Scott has made turns out to be wrong. This is not the movie we thought it was. It may belong to a totally different genre.

There are hints in the early part of the movie as to what is really going on but you’ll probably overlook them because the direction in which they point is so crazy you won’t seriously entertain it. Mastorakis is actually being very clever here - he’s using our genre expectations against us.

The movie’s wild crazy change of direction is what I love about it. It’s the sort of thing I wasn’t expecting in a modestly budgeted direct-to-video movie. It’s more what I would have expected from a 1960s European movie, or maybe from someone like Brian De Palma. And, amusingly, there is a direct Brian De Palma reference in this movie. It won’t help you to figure out what’s going on because Mastorakis isn’t riffing on any particular De Palma movie but he is perhaps being a bit De Palma-esque.

Jess Lester as Scott is perhaps the weak link here. He’s a bit dull but he does do the “deer caught in the headlights” thing quite well and he does give the impression that Scott might be dangerous of pushed over the edge. Lester is reasonably OK.

Adrianne Sachs is OK as Kimberly. She does a fair job of making her enigmatic. Shannon Tweed is fine in a minor role.

For a direct-to-video the production values are high. It has that wonderful aesthetic of 80s excess. The atmosphere of wealth, glamour and decadence works well.

As I mentioned at the beginning it has a similar vibe to two great 80s gialli, Nothing Underneath and Too Beautiful To Die.

In the Cold of the Night is stylish, polished and well-made. It’s fast-paced, crazy and unpredictable. It’s very sexy, with some raunchy sex scenes. That’s the sort of thing that seem to unleash the snarkiness in a lot of reviewers. Which is a pity. It’s an erotic thriller. It’s supposed to be erotic. It is. I enjoyed this movie a whole lot. Highly recommended.