They're Playing with Fire (1984)

They're Playing with Fire is a 1984 erotic thriller directed and co-written by Howard Avedis. 

Its biggest selling point is unquestionably its star, Sybil Danning.

Jay Richard (Eric Brown) is a typical college student who has a major crush on his sexy English professor, Mrs Stevens (Sybil Danning). He is thrilled when she wants to hire him to do some work on her boat (a huge pleasure cruiser). She’s very friendly and tells him to call her Diane). He polishes the woodwork but she wants more than her woodwork polished. Before he knows what’s happening she’s got his trousers off and they’re having wild passionate sex.

She wants him to do another little job for her. And for her husband Michael (Andrew Prine). It’s a harmless prank they want him to play on Michael’s mother and grandmother. All he has to do is break into their mansion and scare them.

What Jay doesn’t know is that Diane and Michael don’t have a penny of their own. Michael’s mother and grandmother are fabulously rich. Diane and Michael want that money and they want it now and they have a plan to get it. 

Unfortunately Jay doesn’t know that he is part of that plan.

The plot does rely on Jay being incredibly gullible but it’s perfectly plausible - he’s young and I don’t think any male would be thinking straight after a steamy bedroom romp with Sybil Danning, especially if he figures there’s a chance she might want her woodwork waxed again in the future.

There’s murder and Jay is uncomfortably aware that he’s likely to be a suspect. He’s left footprints and fingerprints behind at the murder scene.

We, the audience, do not know exactly what happened. We have our suspicions but we can’t be sure. All we know for certain is that Jay didn’t do it. Jay also doesn’t know exactly what happened. He has his suspicions as well but no evidence.

Jay would like to trust Diane, because he’s obsessed by her. But he’s far from sure that he really can trust her. He also has at least some awareness that his lust for Diane might be clouding his judgment.

The plot has fairly decent twists and some good misdirection. It keeps us guessing.

The action finale is OK but probably needed just a bit more energy and imagination.

This was obviously a low-budget movie but the mansion and the yacht give it reasonably high production values.

The acting is pretty good. Andrew Prine is low-key menacing but with a touch of ambiguity. Eric Brown is very good as Jay - it’s a convincing picture of a young guy who cannot believe his luck that this amazingly hot babe wants his body. But he doesn’t make Jay too pathetic or stupid. Or annoying.

But the movie’s biggest asset is of course Sybil Danning and she also effectively keeps us  guessing about Diane. Is she the unscrupulous schemer she appears to be? Has she actually fallen for Jay? She admits that she’s not getting any bedroom action from her husband - maybe the hot sex with Jay is including her judgment as well. It’s a very fine performance. And Miss Danning takes her clothes off frequently and there are moderately steamy sex scenes. 

There’s not a huge amount violence but what there is is quite graphic. Despite what some people claim this is not really a slasher film but the rising popularity of that genre made it commercially advisable to add some moderately graphic stuff to other genres.

This is an erotic thriller, and an erotic thriller that is actually erotic.

Iraq-born Howard Avedis is usually dismissed as a director of cheap drive-in trash. Which is quite unfair. He did make mostly drive-in movies but they were often extremely interesting and rather offbeat. The Stepmother (1972) is an erotic thriller with an inverted mystery structure and it’s not bad. The Teacher (1974) is also an erotic thriller and it’s deliciously crazy and weird. The Fifth Floor (1978) is a One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest rip-off and it’s top-tier psychiatric horror.

They're Playing with Fire is solid entertainment and Sybil Danning is reason enough to make this one highly recommended. And it looks great on Blu-Ray.

Illicit Dreams (1994)

Illicit Dreams is a 1994 erotic thriller starring Shannon Tweed.

Over the past couple of decades quite a few disreputable film genres have been rehabilitated. Even 1970 British sex comedies, once the most despised genre of all, are now available on Blu-Ray, fully restored ad loaded with extras. But there is one film genre that is still regarded as being beyond the pale and totally unworthy of even the smallest respect - 1990s direct-to-video erotic thrillers. You’re still not only allowed to sneer at those - you’re expected to sneer at them.

Shannon Tweed was the queen of the direct-to-video erotic thriller and she’s also regarded as fair game for snarkiness.

Which brings us to Illicit Dreams. Is it really that bad? In my view, no. But it does depend on what you’re expecting from it. We’ll get to that later.

Moira (Shannon Tweed) is married to Daniel Davis (Joe Cortese). He’s a hard-driving rich businessman with powerful political connections. He might wear well-tailored suits but he is really just a slick smooth thug. He treats Moira as a slave. He hits her. He bullies her.

Her friend Melinda (Michelle Johnson) is pushing Moira to divorce Daniel. Melinda means well but it hasn’t occurred to her than Daniel might in fact be genuinely dangerous. Very dangerous.

It’s her dreams that keep Moira going although they also disturb her because they seem so real. She keeps dreaming of a particular man. He’s good-looking and kind and very sexy. She’s never met him, she doesn’t know if he exists, but she loves him.

What Moira doesn’t know is that across town Nick (Andrew Stevens) is having similar dreams, about a woman. The sort of woman he would love to meet. He’s never met her, he doesn’t know if she exists, but he loves her.

The man Moira has been dreaming about is of course Nick. And the woman Nick has been dreaming about is Moira.

Then they meet by accident.

You know that Daniel will find out and that things will get dangerous and nasty. From this point on the movie becomes a fairly straightforward although well-executed erotic thriller. The paranormal elements that make the first half of the movie so interesting get shunted aside. But as an erotic thriller it has some fine suspense and it does get quite tense and exiting towards the end.

And then there’s the ending. I’m not going to risk spoilers by saying any more, except that it left me wanting to hurl a brick at the screen.

Shannon Tweed isn’t the world’s greatest actress but she’s quite good and she’s likeable and sympathetic. Andrew Stevens is a bit dull but he’s OK. Joe Cortese goes way over the top and he’s certainly a memorable and creepy villain.

This was obviously a low-budget movie but it’s slick enough and professional enough and it has a few reasonably effective spooky visual moments.

This is not Citizen Kane. It’s not ground-breaking. It won’t redefine your understanding of cinema. It’s not trying to do any of that. It’s just offering an hour-and-a-half of fairly decent entertainment.

There is some nudity and some sex fairly graphic sex scenes but overall the erotic content is far from excessive.

You might assume that moves such as this, thrillers with added T&A, were aimed mostly at male audiences. Illicit Dreams is however essentially a romance. It’s a paranormal romance. A paranormal steamy romance. Which means that in actuality we’re in serious Chick Flick territory.

Mostly I enjoyed Illicit Dreams, apart from that ending. Recommended, with that caveat.

It’s available on a double-header DVD (paired with another Shannon Tweed flick, Indecent Behavior 4). The transfer is pretty decent. I also highly recommend Shannon Tweed's 1993 movie A Woman Scorned.

Naked Killer (1992)

Naked Killer is a 1992 Hong Kong action thriller. It’s a Category III movie. It’s not overly extreme but it does have some disturbing moments.

This is not a rip-off of Luc Besson’s highly influential La Femme Nikita but it clearly derives some inspiration from that source. Black Cat is another Hong Kong movie made about the same time that really is a La Femme Nikita rip-off albeit a very good one. The influence of Besson’s movie can also be seen in the superb 2001 anime TV series Noir.

What’s great about Hong Kong cinema is that even gritty urban crime thrillers contain elements that you normally expect in other types of Hong Kong movies. For example there’s a lot of kung fu in Naked Killer.

The movie opens with a killing. The killer is a naked woman.

There have been a number of killings with a similar MO. The Hong Kong cops do not believe a woman could have carried out such a killing but detective Tinam (Simon Yam) disagrees. He is certain that the killer was a woman.

Tinam has personal problems. He killed his brother. His brother was a cop. Tinam shot him accidentally. It was a complete accident and nobody blames Tinam, except that naturally he blames himself. Now he’s impotent and he also can’t even hold a gun steady much less shoot it. But he’s still a good cop.

Mayhem breaks out in the police station. Which is how Tinam meets Kitty (Chingmy Yau). He doesn’t know what she does for a living, which is just as well.

Kitty has met Sister Cindy (Wei Yao). She’s the top hitman (or hitwoman) in the Colony. Sister Cindy is going to teach Kitty to be a top assassin. Kitty is already a pretty dangerous killer.

Kitty will have to change her identity. She becomes Vivian Shang.

Sister Cindy and Kitty/Vivian develop a complex emotional mentor/pupil relationship (a bit along the lines of the 1972 hitman classic The Mechanic).

Sister Cindy’s previous pupil, Princess (Carrie Ng), is going to be a problem. Princess is the number two assassin in the business. She aims to be number one. That means that she has to dispose of Sister Cindy. Princess is a lesbian. She has a new girlfriend/protégé, Baby (Madoka Sugawara).

Tinam encounters Kitty again. At least he’s almost certain it’s Kitty but now she says she’s Vivian.

The cops, in a desultory kind of way, are hunting the female assassins. Sister Cindy has always been a hunter but now she’s finding out what it’s like to be the hunted. But those who are hunting her might also be about to find out how it feels to be the hunted.

All the cast members are good. Simon Yam is excellent as Tinam, a hero with some huge weaknesses but basically decent guy. But this movie belongs to Chingmy Yau. She’s amazing.

Although it’s a Category III movie there’s not a huge amount of gore. It’s more that it deals with gruesome ideas. There’s no graphic sex and not a great deal of nudity, but the lesbianism and the unhealthy nature of some of the sexual obsessions probably bumped it into Category III. And the eroticism does get a bit steamy.

There’s an abundance of action and relentless mayhem. There’s also comedy, some if it pretty broad and some it pretty dark.

You have to accept that this film adheres to some of the conventions of Hong Kong action cinema. The good guys carry automatic pistols that appear to be equipped with 200 round magazines. A few dozen goons with machine-guns are no match for a feisty heroine with a handgun. The good guys can leap through the air as if they’re in a kung fu movie because this is a kung fu movie as well as being lots of other things. Hong Kong filmmakers did not stress too much about genre.

Director Clarence Fok adopts a wildly flamboyant visual style and the movie is supercharged with energy. Jing Wong’s script (he also produced) isn’t especially coherent but he knows how to pack his story with audience-pleasing ingredients and if things get confusing then that to some extent reflects the fact that the protagonist, Tinam, has no clear idea what is going on most of the time.

Naked Killer powers along and it has as much style and panache as any reasonable person could ask for. This is a wild ride and it’s highly recommended.

Naked Killer has not had a Blu-Ray release which is scandalous. It is still available on DVD.

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.

Naked Vengeance (1985)

Naked Vengeance is a 1985 erotic thriller and we’re clearly in direct-to-video territory here. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. A lot of 80s/90s direct-to-video movies are get fun. But then you see the dreaded words “directed by Cirio H. Santiago” in the credits and you know that this is going to be total schlock.

This is one of those movies that reeks of middle-class urbanites’ fear and loathing for working-class and rural Americans. It reflects their firm conviction that once you pass the city limits of a major burg such as L.A. everyone is an inbred low-life redneck thug. In this case it’s done in such a clumsy heavy-handed obvious way that it’s almost comical. But given that the director was a Filipino and the co-writer and producer was Indian maybe it just reflects an intense dislike for Americans.

Carla Harris (Deborah Tranelli) is a former actress married to a rich L.A. businessman. He is killed trying to save a young woman who was being attacked in a parking lot.

Carla flees back to her rural home town to live with her parents. Maybe she’s seeking security but as soon as she arrives it’s obvious that she regards the town and everyone in it with a wealthy city-dweller’s contempt for small-town America, and they hate her for being from the city.

Within a day half the men in the town in the town have tried to rape her.

The sheriff is unsympathetic. He thinks she’s a snooty stuck-up city rich bitch.

Of course the men in the town get together to go to her house (or rather her parents’ house) to teach her a lesson while her parents are away for the weekend and it ends in horror and mayhem.

Carla ends up in a mental hospital in a catatonic state. Or so it appears. But maybe she’s not so catatonic. And maybe she’s out for revenge. Maybe she even has plans for getting her revenge.

Lots of mayhem ensues.

This is in many ways a very bad movie. It’s technically a bit slapdash. Santiago’s direction is fairly uninspired. Don’t expect any visual flourishes. It’s all done by the numbers.

You could drive an 18-wheeler through the plot holes. After the night of mayhem at Carla’s parents’ house we’re expected to believe that the cops could not find a single piece of forensic evidence even after half a dozen guys had run amok. And apparently it never occurred to the cops to have Carla physically examined.

When Carla starts wreaking vengeance her victims take no precautions even though they know that she intends to kill them one by one.

Deborah Tranelli isn’t too bad but apart from her the acting is breathtakingly awful. It doesn’t help that every character is no more than a standard type, with zero depth.

On the other hand the murder scenes as Carla stalks her victims are done reasonably well. Santiago wasn’t much of a director but violent action scenes were something he could do. There’s plenty of carnage and gallons of blood but there’s also some real energy here and even a certain amount of imagination. The speedboat scene and scene at the car repair shop are grisly but rather good.

There’s some nudity and the scene in which Carla is violated by the bad guys would require a whole raft of trigger warnings today. It is a confronting scene but it is necessary. We have to feel that Carla has some justification for her bloody campaign of revenge.

There’s an amusing homage to the 1931 Frankenstein movie but I won’t spoil things by saying any more.

Naked Vengeance is sleazy and grimy but sleazy and grimy are not necessarily bad things. It’s a badly made movie with a very very thin script but with enough beer and popcorn you might get some fun out of it.

Shout! Factory’s Blu-Ray transfer looks pretty good.

Santiago did manage to make one genuinely entertaining movie, the pleasingly crazed Firecracker (AKA Naked Fist, 1981).

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.

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.

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.

Dream Lover (1993)

Dream Lover is a 1993 erotic thriller, made at a time when erotic thrillers and neo-noirs were all the rage. This movie fits into both these categories,

Ray (James Spader) is a successful architect, newly divorced. The whole dating thing is a bit new and bewildering to him. His buddy Norman keeps trying to fix him up with women but they’re all so obviously wrong that they don’t even get to first base with Ray. Then at a party he spills wine all over Lena’s new dress. He has never met Lena (Mädchen Amick) before. The next day, quite by accident, he runs into Lena at the supermarket and they end up having dinner. She’s friendly and at the same time she’s pushing him away. They just have dinner, no more than that.

Ray is certainly not a loser. He’s just a but vulnerable at this moment, and the loneliness is just starting to get to him. He’s not exactly desperate but he really is strangely attracted to this girl and he’s not giving up.

They sleep together and that’s it for Ray. He’s fallen for her big time. He’s that kind of guy, He’s a romantic.

Pretty soon they’re married. It’s like a dream come true. He still gets on well with his first wife but they were never right for each other. It’s not like that with Lena. They’re perfect for each other.

And they have a child and the perfect marriage is still perfect.

It all seems like a very straightforward romance story. Except for the dreams Ray has. Slightly unsettling dreams about a carnival.

And there are little things. Right from the start Lena occasionally reacts in slightly odd ways. She doesn’t like to talk about her childhood. Things are not really happening between them in the bedroom any more. There are clues. Subtle clues. They’re probably nothing. But sometimes husbands do get suspicious about little things.

The problem is that he has no idea what it is that he suspects. And the viewer has no idea either. It might not be such a big deal. It’s just these odd little things that are not quite right.

I’m not going to say any more about the plot for fear of revealing spoilers, other than the fact that at this point the plot really gets moving and the movie changes gears.

Ray is a nice guy. He’s not exactly dumb but he is a romantic. His life has always run smoothly. As far as Ray is concerned the world is a place where everything makes sense. He knows that people are not perfect but he thinks that mostly they’re OK and that their actions makes sense. He has never encountered any problem he couldn’t handle. He’s obviously had a good upbringing, he’s successful, he has money. He’s been sheltered from the seamy unpleasant side of life.

I can’t say very much at all about the acting performances because that would also risk spoilers, other than to say that James Spader and Mädchen Amick are both very impressive.

There are three women who play key roles - Lena, Ray’s first wife Martha (Kathleen York) and Ray’s lawyer Elaine (Bess Armstrong).

This is Nicholas Kazan’s only feature film as director. He also wrote the screenplay and seems to have had a modestly successful career as a screenwriter. His screenplay here is quite ambitious.

Is this a neo-noir? I think it is. It involves a protagonist led along the path to destruction by a character flaw, and the flaw is an interesting one - a willingness to be deceived.

One of the three women turns out to be a definite femme fatale (and an interesting one) so there’s definitely enough here to justify the neo-noir label.

The dream sequences are an interesting touch. They have a very slight David Lynchian feel. They are unsettling. They’re puzzling but they do eventually make a kind of sense.

This is a movie that is often treated rather dismissively on the grounds that the plot involves wild implausibilities. I suspect that most reviewers have failed to consider that those dream sequences might be there for a reason. They might be crucial. They might even be the most important parts of the movie. I’m amazed that anyone could assume that they’ve just been thrown in for no reason at all.

I’m not going to tell you what I think is going on because I’m not certain, and that’s what I like most about this movie. There’s the possibility that it’s not as straightforward as it seems to be.

I liked Dream Lover a lot. Highly recommended.

A Kite (1998)

A Kite is a 1998 anime and its release history is rather interesting. It’s a two-episode OVA (intended for direct-to-video release). Given the subject matter this could never have been screened on television, either in the U.S. or Japan.

Releasing it in the U.S. raised some tricky problems. This is not an adult anime. It is not hentai. It does however contain hardcore sex senes. Yasuomi Umetsu conceived the idea of an anime about a girl assassin and he was also approached to do an X-rated anime. He decided to combine the two ideas. It was made as an X-rated OVA. The American distributors did not want to release it as hentai - there’s not enough sex for that market and it was clearly a very high-quality production that deserved a regular release as a violent action crime thriller. It’s not an adult anime but it is very much an anime aimed at a grown-up audience.

The answer to the U.S. distribution problem was to censor it. It was released and was successful. That censored version was later released in Japan as well. Then it was decided that it should get an uncut release. In fact this new version was not completely uncut. Then a few years later a totally uncut version was released on Blu-Ray.

As a result of all this there are about five different versions of A Kite. The most recent Discotek Blu-Ray includes three versions - the heavily cut version, a fairly uncut version and the totally uncut version.

The version reviewed here is the totally uncut one.

A Kite was clearly influenced to some extent by Luc Besson’s two 90s masterpieces, La Femme Nikita and Leon The Professional.

Sawa is a cute young woman. She’s a hitwoman. She’s deadly and she’s ruthless. She is given assignments by two men, Kanie and Akai. Akai is a cop. They also employ a young male assassin, Oburi.

How Sawa came to be a professional killer is connected to events in her past, and those events explain her complicated relationships to both Kanie and Akai.

Sawa and Oburi are attracted to each other, which is likely to have repercussions.

The emotional attraction between Sawa and Oburi is important in plot terms but the focus is very much on Sawa. Her responses to situations as they develop drive the plot.

A contract on a movie star causes major problems. The hit does not go smoothly.

And Sawa has confirmation of some suspicions about her past.

The violence is frequent, very brutal and very graphic. It’s both the extreme violence and the sex that make this an anime for grown-ups.

If you don’t mind the hardcore sex I recommend the uncut “International” version. The very complex power dynamics played out between Kanie, Akai, Oburi and Sawa are fuelled to a large extent by the sexual relationships Sawa has with both Kanie and Akai. They might not be healthy relationships but they’re very intense and the fact that Sawa may be a willing participant (although her feelings and motivations are very tangled and contradictory and complex) is important. It’s also important to realise that despite these tangled motivations she gets physical pleasure from the sex.

We also need to take account of the fact that Sawa has an agenda. She has a reason for being willing to engage in the sexual encounters. There is something she knows, something she has known in her heart for a long time, and for that reason she has to remain close to Kanie and Akai, and that means agreeing to be used as a sexual plaything.

This makes Sawa a much more interesting character and without the sex scenes her actions would be less comprehensible. Apart from being an action thriller this is an erotic thriller. My impression is that Mr Umetsu decided that if he had to include sexual content he might as well make it a pivotal ingredient in both plot and character terms.

Most reviewers just cannot cope with the idea that explicit sex might serve a purpose, that maybe the sex scenes needed to be raw and confronting and intense to get across to the viewer the extent to which Sawa has been drawn into this world of dangerous unhealthy twisted sex. Those scenes are supposed to be a kick in the guts.

Everything in this OVA was intended to be a kick in the guts. This is not a feelgood story.

A Kite is very disturbing. But in its own way it manages to be quite powerful. The power of a movie does not necessarily come from the plot (which in this case is fairly straightforward). Often the power comes from the atmosphere, the tone and the sheer intensity and shock value of the imagery. That’s where A Kite scores highly. If you’re too timid to watch the uncut version then you’ll be seeing a routine violent action thriller. If you’re prepared to brave the uncut version you’ll be seeing something a lot more disturbing and a lot more hard-hitting.

A Kite is highly recommended, but it’s not for the faint-hearted.