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.

Femme Fatale (2002)

Femme Fatale is a 2002 erotic thriller (with a very strong neo-noir vibe) written and directed by Brian De Palma. It was a box-office flop at the time although it now has a strong cult following and its reputation has grown considerably. It’s one of my favourite De Palma movies. It’s so very De Palma.

It may simply have mystified and exasperated some people. It takes some wild risks. Whether they pay off or not is something you will have to decide. It depends on your tolerance for thrillers that break the rules.

The most important aspect of this movie is the one that can’t even be hinted at. You do not want to read any spoilers for Femme Fatale. I am not going to offer hints at all. Naturally most online reviewers go ahead and spoil the movie anyway so you may want to avoid them before seeing the movie.

What I will say is that you do need to pay attention when watching this movie. There are things you should be noticing.

It begins with a daring jewel heist during the Cannes Film Festival. The jewels are in the form of a snake brassiere worn by a supermodel. Sexy Laure (Rebecca Romijn) steals the jewels while having sex with the supermodel in the ladies’ room. The heist is a spectacular extended visual set-piece with very little dialogue. When it comes to sheer mastery of technique De Palma has never done anything better. Then we get a chase of sorts, or maybe it’s a stalking, and it’s done as another impressive visual set-piece.

Laure figures she’d be wise to get out of France. Start a new life somewhere. Which she does. That’s going fine until down-at-heel paparazzo Nicolas Bardo (Antonio Banderas) snaps her picture. Laure cannot afford to have any photographs of herself. Much too dangerous.

Then the twists start to kick in. Nicolas thinks he’s the knight in shining armour rescuing a damsel in distress. It takes him quite a while to realise that Laure is not a damsel in distress. She’s a psycho bitch. She’s a femme fatale on steroids.

Nicolas is in the spider’s web now. More plot twists follow, before the really big plot twist.

When the so-called New American Cinema burst onto the scene round 1967 it saw itself, like the French Nouvelle Vague, the British New Wave and the New German Cinema, as a revolutionary movement that would sweep away the past and create something totally new. Tradition was something that needed to be scrapped. It was all very adolescent.

Brian De Palma made his first feature film in 1968 but I think it’s clear that that was never his attitude. De Palma saw himself as part of a living tradition of filmmaking. He didn’t want to scrap that tradition. He wanted to be part of it.

Of course his admiration for Hitchcock was part of this. But he didn’t see Hitchcock’s body of work as a resource to be plundered. He had seen Hitchcock’s movies. He understood them. He understood Hitchcock’s methods. He has absorbed them. He then set out to make Brian De Palma movies, making use of the lessons he had learnt from Hitchcock and other masters of the past. Sure, he liked to include Hitchcock homages but they were clever and witty and his movies were always Brian De Palma movies.

He lays his cards on the table right at the start of Femme Fatale. We see a woman watching Double Indemnity on TV. We know that we’re about to see a movie that draws on the filmmaking tradition that produced movies like Double Indemnity.

There’s lots of voyeurism in this movie. With a hero who is a photographer and a photograph as a key plot element that’s to be expected and voyeurism is a theme that De Palma knew how to handle. At times in this movie there are multiple voyeurs. Lots of people are watching Laure.

You want wild crazy camera angles? You got ’em. And lots of very cool overhead shots. You want split screens? You got them too. And naturally split diopter shots. De Palma could get away with things like this. This is a De Palma film so naturally it is very much an exercise in style and it really does have insane amounts of style.

Laure (Rebecca Romijn) is very sexy and very wicked. De Palma doesn’t stint on the eroticism.

Antonio Banderas is very good and very sympathetic, playing a nice guy who is just getting more and more out of his depth.

As for the element I can’t talk about, whether it works or not is up to the viewer to decide. It’s something that has been done before but then De Palma adds some extra twists.

This is one of those movies that is worth rewatching. The second time around you’ll be seeing everything in a radically different way and you’ll be able to appreciate the way De Palma never actually cheats.

Femme Fatale is definitely a neo-noir but it’s a lot more than that. Very highly recommended.

Femme Fatale looks great on Blu-Ray. The Blu-Ray extras are, surprisingly, very worthwhile but do not under any circumstances watch the featurettes before you watch the movie. They contain a whole bunch of spoilers.

Wild at Heart (1990)

Wild at Heart was David Lynch’s next feature film after Blue Velvet. Blue Velvet was not exactly a conventional Hollywood movie. Wild at Heart is much weirder. Lynch had clearly decided that he wasn’t even going to go through the motions of conforming to conventional ideas about movie-making. He was setting off on his own path and if you wanted to follow him that was up to you.

I rewatched Blue Velvet recently and came to the conclusion that if you think you understand that movie that is proof positive that you don’t understand it. In fact if you’re trying to understand it in any kind of rational logical way then you’ve missed the point entirely. That applies even more strongly to Wild at Heart. That does not imply that these movies don’t mean anything. They mean a great deal, but as soon as you think you’ve pinned down the meanings in a neat tidy way those meanings slip away from you. The meanings can change from one viewing to another. Your idea of what Wild at Heart means might differ radically from mine but we can both be right.

It’s amusing to see people describing Wild at Heart as some kind of homage to film noir.

The numerous references scattered throughout the movie to The Wizard of Oz make it clear that this is a movie with zero pretensions to realism. It’s a fantasy movie. In fact it’s a fairy tale movie. Once upon a time a young man named Sailor (Nicolas Cage) fell in love with a beautiful princess named Lula (Laura Dern). Her evil stepmother tried to keep them apart. The evil stepmother is jealous of Lula’s beauty and goodness. The young man has to fight ogres and monsters to prove his love. The young man and the princess are stalked by the Wicked Witch of the West. But although he doesn’t know it the Good Witch of the North is watching over him.

Only in this case the young man is a two-bit loser serving a stretch for manslaughter. The beautiful princess is a crazy chick obsessed with sex. The evil stepmother is Lula’s mother Marietta (Diane Ladd) who wants to have sex with Sailor. The ogres and monsters are assorted gangsters and hoodlums and psychos. But the Wicked Witch of the West really is stalking them. Lula has seen her. And the Good Witch of the North really is keeping an eye on them.

It is pointless to fret about the fact that the characters in David Lynch movies are not believable. They’re not supposed to be. They’re fairy tale characters. It’s pointless to worry about plot incoherence. This is a fantasy story.

It’s also impossible to judge the acting by normal standards. By any conventional standards all of the acting performances are ludicrously atrocious. But they’re just right for a David Lynch movie.

The characters are not stereotypes, but archetypes. While they can be seen as fairy tale archetypes they are also American pop culture archetypes. Or rather they’re blends of various American pop culture archetypes. Sailor is the Rebel, the Outsider. Sailor is also Elvis, another pop culture archetype. Other characters represent Gangster and Hoodlum archetypes. They’re not real people.

There are lots of totally irrelevant scenes that are there because this is David Lynch and he likes adding lots of weird stuff. But the Wizard of Oz references are not irrelevant. They’re the key to the movie. If you can’t believe in fairy tales you cannot possibly enjoy this movie.

You can see some film noir elements in the movie. It also fits into the “couple on the run” sub-genre. But it’s not handled in anything like a film noir style.

This is not quite a surrealist movie although it certainly includes moments with a surrealist tinge.

There is a very Lynchian blending of extreme violence and sweet romanticism. Which is of course what you get in fairy tales. Plenty of ultra-violence, and then the hero and the heroine live happily ever after. The violence really is very extreme. But in spite of that this is a wildly deliriously romantic movie. This is, in its own way, a feelgood movie. It's insanely romantic.

The core of the movie is the love story and it’s a very simple story. Boy meets girl, bad people try to keep them apart but nothing can destroy their love. The only thing that matters for Sailor is his love for Lula. The only thing that matters for Lula is her love for Sailor. Without their love they would be nothing. But if they have their love they don’t need anything else.

It’s worth noting that the ending is the ending that Lynch always believed the movie needed. He was right.

There were a lot of Hollywood movies in the 80s and 90s trying to deal with sex in a grown-up way but the traditional Hollywood approach always has been and always will be that sexual obsession is a terrifying destructive force. I’m finding it hard to think of any Hollywood movie that deals with sexual obsession more positively than Wild at Heart. There’s more to the love between these two people than sex but sex is a very very big part of their love. They want to devour each other’s bodies. The sex scenes are very raw and very intense. But their sexual obsession is portrayed as an entirely positive thing. It’s the wild crazy obsessive sex that makes their love perfect and complete.

Nic Cage is perfect. The fact that Cage, who is obsessed with Elvis, plays a character obsessed with Elvis is another of the movie’s delights. And he gets to sing Love Me Tender to his girl, and yes it is Cage singing. Laura Dern is amazing. At one point she tells us that the world is wild at heart and weird on top. That could describe Laura Dern’s performance. And of course it describes the love between Sailor and Lula. Maybe you have to be wild at heart and weird on top to fully appreciate this movie. If so, count me among the wild at heart. A great movie. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Blue Velvet.

Blue Velvet (1986)

I didn’t like David Lynch’s Blue Velvet the first time I saw it. That was a long time ago, I’m now more accustomed to his work and I’m now much more open to unconventional filmmaking. Also, the first time you watch a movie you focus on the story. When you watch it again you focus on how the story is told. And on the style.

So I figured it was time to give Blue Velvet another shot.

I can now see so many things to admire in this movie. I’m still not entirely sure about it, but that’s the way David Lynch’s movies are. If you think you understand one of his movies that’s a sure sign that you don’t understand it.

I do love that opening sequence. It tells us what we need to know. We have left the real world. We are now in David Lynch’s world. And it does this cleverly and subtly. Everything about the town of Lumberton is wrong. Just slightly wrong, but still wrong. This is like reality, but shifted off-kilter. At first you think Lynch is aiming at satire but that is not his agenda. He’s pulling the ground from underneath us. From now on we cannot assume that anything we see is to be taken at face value.

Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is a normal high school kid. Like everything else in Lumberton he’s so normal as to be disturbingly abnormal.

He finds an ear. A human ear. In a field. He takes it to the cops, to Detective Williams (George Dickerson). Jeffrey figures he’s stumbled upon a murder.

He meets a sweet girl, Sandy (Laura Dern). She’s so sweet as to be pathological. She’s the daughter of Detective Williams. She has overheard something that suggests that this case has something to do with a nightclub singer named Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini). Jeffrey and Sandy decide to play amateur detective.

The fact that this clue was something Sandy overheard is significant. Jeffrey is playing detective but he’s like someone trying to make sense of a play but he’s only seen a brief brief scenes, and who then ends up becoming part of the play. But he doesn’t know what the play is about, he doesn’t know if it’s a comedy or a tragedy or a romance or a murder mystery. And he doesn’t know if he has walked in in the middle of the first act or the middle of the third act. He doesn’t know if the other characters are heroes or villains.

The audience of course is in the same boat. We don’t know at first what kind of movie this. When we get to the end, we still don’t know. But we’ve had a wild ride.

There’s a definite interest in voyeurism here, but to an even greater extent than in other notable movies about voyeurism this is voyeurism in which everything seen or heard may be totally misinterpreted. To gather evidence he breaks into Dorothy’s apartment and hides in a wardrobe. Sandy is perhaps not quite as innocent as Jeffrey. She wonders if Jeffrey just wants to spy on Dorothy in hopes of seeing her naked. It’s possible that Jeffrey isn’t quite sure of his own motives. We have to suspect that Sandy might be right.

Jeffrey really isn’t prepared for what he sees. He witnesses a sadomasochistic sexual encounter between Dorothy and a very very scary man named Frank Booth (Dennis Hopper). Jeffrey is naïve, good-natured and not too bright and he’s sure he knows what’s going on. Jeffrey thinks Frank is an evil man and Dorothy is being brutalised and abused. He just can’t figure out why Dorothy seems to enjoy it.

Jeffrey is both right and wrong. Frank is a monster. But Dorothy does get off on playing the submissive role in sadomasochistic sex. Jeffrey will discover that when he later has sex with Dorothy. She wants Jeffrey to hurt her. He does hurt her. Now Jeffrey is really disturbed. Jeffrey isn’t equipped to deal with any of this.

The twist is that Dorothy seems to get aroused by the sex but she’s not an entirely willing partner. Maybe Dorothy doesn’t understand her own motivations. Maybe people in general don’t understand their own motivations.

What is really going on in this movie is open to debate. It does seem like Jeffrey has found himself in a different realty, or a different non-reality. It’s as if he’s left Lumberton and now he’s in Frank Booth’s world. But the opening sequence has alerted us to the fact that we, the audience, are already in a different realty, or a different non-reality - the hyper-real shifted reality world of Lumberton. There would seem to be several layers of non-reality happening. It is of course also possible that each of the major characters inhabits his or her own world. Even after he has slept with her Jeffrey cannot comprehend Dorothy’s world. Perhaps he simply cannot enter her world.

Initially I had serious reservations about Dennis Hopper’s performance which veers perilously close to self-parody. This is however a movie you have to think about. If you see Frank as not really a human villain but a monster out of a nightmare (or even a fairy-tale monster) his performance makes more sense. And some of the other bizarre performances start to make sense. Characters in a dream behave according to dream logic.

In fact this movie makes more sense when you stop trying to make sense of it. Surrealism doesn’t obey the conventional rules of storytelling or of characterisation.

There’s quite a bit of black comedy which serves to undercut even further any illusions we have that this is the normal everyday world. Of course it’s also possible that Lynch is suggesting that the everyday world which we believe to be ordered and logical and rational is in fact chaotic, illogical and irrational. We are already in a dream world. All of which helps to explain one of the central mysteries, which is Dorothy’s tendency to behave in such odd unexpected ways.

Blue Velvet impressed me much much more this time around. It’s a perplexing provocative but fascinating movie. David Lynch really found his voice with this film. He found the style and the techniques which he would exploit with such success over the next fifteen year. Blue Velvet is like a dry run for Twin Peaks. Very highly recommended.