Human Desires (Indecent Behaviour 4, 1997)

Human Desires, released in 1997, also goes by the title Indecent Behaviour 4 although I’m told it has little connection to the earlier films in that series. This is a direct-to-video erotic thriller starring Shannon Tweed so of course most people have already decided it’s junk before even watching it. There are actually a couple of slightly odd things about this movie that make it interesting.

It’s a private eye thriller with lots of sex and nudity. Again, to a lot of people that means it must be junk. So most people go straight into Snark Mode. Almost every online review you read will tell you that this is just a softcore movie with zero plot. That’s nonsense. It has a perfectly serviceable plot.

It begins with a pyjama party thrown by Alicia Royale (Shannon Tweed). She and her husband Miles (Ashby Adams) run a top-flight fashion modelling agency. They’re looking for a model to headline a major campaign for their biggest client. There’s a lot of money in it for the agency. There’s a lot of money in it for the girl. It will catapult her straight into the ranks of the supermodels.

There are three contenders - Julia (Peggy Trentini), Zoe (Dawn Ann Billings) and Melinda (Lisa Nohea).

Then Julia is found floating face down in the swimming pool. It appears to be suicide.

Dean Thomas (Christian Noble) was out of place at the party. He’s a down-at-heel private eye. As luck would have it Dean and Zoe are the ones who discover Julia’s body.

Zoe wants to hire Dean to investigate. She suspects murder. Dean isn’t interested. He’s an ex-cop but he likes being a PI because missing persons cases, background checks and exposing straying wives who are having affairs is easy work and it’s safe work. He’s not Mike Hammer. He doesn’t want to be Mike Hammer. He has no interest in murder cases.

Dean eventually takes the case because of Maria. Five years earlier he was a cop. Maria was an informant. He got involved with her. He fell in love with her, and that led him to make a mistake that got her killed.

His motivation for taking this case is not quite guilt. He just doesn’t like seeing women get murdered and he doesn’t like it when their killers get away with it. Maria’s killer got away with it.

And there is a chance it was murder. The cops think it was suicide but they don’t rule out murder. They don’t however think there’s any chance of proving it and they have other cases to deal with. They haven’t closed this case but they’re not actively pursuing it.

What I like about his movie is that Dean is not a standard movie PI. He doesn’t do the tough guy routine. That’s not what real PIs do. If you’re a PI and you’re spending a great deal of time beating guys up or getting beaten up you’re in the wrong job. PIs gather evidence. They try to keep out of trouble. That’s what Dean does. He doesn’t get into a single fistfight in the whole movie.

On the other hand he is a trained investigator. He does know how to gather evidence and he knows how to connect different pieces of evidence. He’s competent when it comes to routine investigations.

I like the fact that Human Desires ignores a lot of standard PI thriller clichés. Miles wants to pressure Dean into dropping his investigation. We know what will happen next. Dean will get roughed up by hoods. That’s what happens in PI movies. But it doesn’t happen here. Miles is not a nice guy but he’s not a gangster. He runs a modelling agency. In the world of high fashion you don’t send guys to break other guy’s legs. Miles doesn’t even get his head of security, tough ex-cop Roddy Daniels (Duke Stroud), to threaten Dean. Roddy just begs Dean to back off.

So, surprisingly perhaps, these people behave like real people not crime thriller stereotypes.

There are half a dozen suspects. All have movies, but not one has a motive sufficiently overwhelming to enable us to be sure of their guilt.

The acting is generally quite adequate.

The biggest problem is director Ellen Earnshaw. She’s good on pacing but she doesn’t know how to direct sex scenes. All the sex scenes here are the same. She makes no attempt to add visual interest by shooting different sex scenes in slightly different ways, with different setting, different lighting, different camera angles. It’s one of the oddities of softcore cinema that male directors make sex scenes much more genuinely erotic because they put more imagination into them. The sex scenes here are steamy enough but they just blend into one another.

Human Desires has lots of sex and T&A but it has a decent enough thriller story. If that sounds like your thing it’s recommended. I have to confess that I rather enjoyed it.

Human Desires is available on DVD paired with another interesting (although flawed) Shanon Tweed movie, Illicit Dreams.