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.

Firing Line (1988)

Firing Line is a very cheap 1988 jungle war action movie. I’ve recently become interested in exploring Shannon Tweed’s filmography and her movies are not easy to find so when I saw this one on DVD I grabbed it. But this is definitely not a typical Shannon Tweed movie.

The setting is an unnamed Central American republic. An American Mark Hardin (Reb Brown) has been captured by government soldiers. We have no real idea who Mark Hardin is except for a brief hint that he may have been a mercenary. We know no idea why the government had him arrested and we never find out.

e don’t know anything about the government except that we seem to be expected to see them as the bad guys. There’s a tough hardbitten American guy working with the government. He might be an American military advisor ie he might be C.I.A. or he might be a mercenary. We’re never told.

He has some kind of connection with a cute blonde American girl, Sandra Spencer (Shannon Tweed). We don’t know who she is or where she came from or why she’s in Central America or how she came to know Mark Hardin. We never find out. The government is after her as well, but we never find out why.

Mark and Sandra join a rebel group in the jungle-covered hills. We never find out what cause the rebels are fighting for. We never find out why Mark Hardin joins them but we assume he was a mercenary working for the government and he had a falling out with them.

The rebels are attacked by government troops. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Mark helps the rebels to bust Montiero out of gaol. We never find out why Montiero was arrested or why it’s important to rescue him. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Then the rebels attack a military post. There’s lots of shooting and explosions.

Later the rebels try to capture the radio station, but the attack doesn’t seem to achieve anything apart from offering the opportunity for lots of shooting and explosions.

At one stage Mark and Sandra wander off into the woods for a bit of recreation. We get an unbelievably brief unbelievably tame totally passionless love scene.

Then there’s more action centred on a bridge, and more shooting and explosions.

I won’t tell you whether the good guys or the bad guys eventually win and to be honest you may not care very much.

There are two credited screenwriters but there’s nothing in this movie to suggest that it ever had what you might call an actual script. Or even an actual director. We don’t learn anything about the motivations of any of the characters. We don’t know why any of the events happen.

The acting is terrible. I’ve now seen four of Shannon Tweed’s movies and I think she’s quite a good actress (yes, really) but this is the weakest performance I’ve seen from her. It’s not her fault. Her part is horribly underwritten. Since Mark Hardin’s part is horribly underwritten as well it’s difficult for these two to get any chemistry going. Apart from their brief roll in the hay and a brief swimming scene we don’t have enough of an idea how they feel about each other. We don’t see any scenes of tenderness or playfulness between them. If we knew they were madly in love we’d be a bit more invested in the story.

This is a movie that desperately needed some nudity and sex not only to break the monotony but to convince us that there’s some real fire and passion between Mark and Sandra. And casting Shannon Tweed and not giving her any opportunity to be seductive and sexy is eccentric to say the least.

Another problem is that you have a cute blonde babe here but she’s never put into any real danger so Mark doesn’t get to do anything brave and heroic to rescue her. He also never seems in any real danger so we don’t get to see Sandra desperately worrying about her man’s safety.

The action scenes are lively and relentless although not terribly inspired. It’s like the same basic action scene endlessly repeated.

This really is a total zero of a movie.

But don’t let this put you off Shannon Tweed. Given a decent role she could be very effective and deliver some genuinely interesting performances. Check her out in Illicit Dreams and especially her delightfully twisted performance in the excellent A Woman Scorned.

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.