Trigger warnings: This post includes references to sexual assault and abusive relationships. It also features photos of men kissing and Charisma Carpenter nude, but I can’t believe either of those things is a problem for readers of this blog.
Goddammit! I thought I had a good six months before I’d have to review the third
365 Days movie, but that was, like a lower subscription price or fewer
transphobic comedy specials, just too fucking much to ask of Netflix. So, on August 19 the streamer dropped
The Next 365 Days, and now, because I hopped on the bandwagon of reviewers shitting on this softcore sludge, I feel duty-bound to review it.
But first, let’s check out one of the first Fifty Shades of Grey knockoffs, 2015’s BOUND, from the studio that brought us the Sharknado franchise.
The Asylum was so eager to capitalize on the Fifty Shades sensation buzzing between pop cultures’ trembling thighs that it not only released the first Fifty Shades-inspired knockoff, the studio released it a full month before the first movie adaptation of E.L. James’ tragically popular porno books hit theaters.
Now, just because a movie is released by the Asylum doesn’t automatically mean it will be bad. They did give us Stuart Gordon’s King of the Ants, which is actually good, and the company has put out a few Christmas-themed movies that have a gotten five-out-of-ten stars or (slightly) higher on IMDb. The fact that Bound’s story did not include any supernatural elements also gave me hope as it would not be hindered by any shitty CGI. Plus, Bound stars Charisma Carpenter of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel. That’s a good sign, isn’t it? After all, she was quoted in 2003 as saying, “I’m not going to just do anything simply because the money is good. If I can't love a project, then I’m not interested.”
 |
This is likely the expression Charisma had
when she got to page 5 of the script. |
Then I watched the movie. Charisma lied. Or, maybe she agreed to take the part only knowing the movie’s title, thinking she’d be appearing in a remake of Lana and Lily Wachowski’s acclaimed lesbian thriller, only to realize too late that she’d been duped. But, most likely, her position changed as the years went by and the career momentum from Buffy and Angel began to wane. The only reason anyone appeared in Bound is the only the only reason the movie was made to begin with: to make a quick buck.
But while Bound is a cash-in on Fifty Shades, director and co-screenwriter Jason Cohn has done what he can to ensure that it isn’t a total rip-off. Michelle Mulan (Carpenter) is no naïve college student but a single mother with a daughter about to start college and a boyfriend, George (Mark McClain Wilson), who can’t make her cum.
Though maybe don’t feel too sorry for Michelle. Sure, she may have to use a vibrator to get off, but she also lives in a house the size of a Comfort Inn.
 |
This is Michelle’s house. I call bullshit.
|
 |
Daniel Baldwin, delivering the performance
you’d expect of him.
|
How is Michelle able to afford a mansion, and in Southern California, no less? She’s an executive for a real estate development company run by her father Walter, played by Daniel Baldwin (OK, you can go back to feeling sorry for her). But the company is not doing so well, and Walter’s right hand man Preston (“that guy” Michael Monks, cranking it up to 11) is pushing Walter to accept a bid to be bought out by a rival. Michelle is opposed to the sale, but she doesn’t yet have an alternative idea and is immediately dismissed by Preston, who’s an asshole. Lest you think Michelle has her father’s ear, Walter says he’s “inclined” to take Preston’s recommendation. “You said you wanted to sit at the table with the big kids,” Walter tells his frustrated daughter. It should be noted that all the other “big kids” are men.
So, Michelle might live in a mansion (yes, I’m going to keep harping on it, because it’s fucking ridiculous), but she’s not respected at work, and she’s got daddy issues. And George can’t find her clit to save his life!
 |
Ryan hopes Michelle will overlook his Big
Rapist Energy.
|
Then she meets Ryan (the late Bryce Draper, no stranger to
Z-grade material), who makes eyes at her from the bar while she and her daughter Dara (Morgan Obenreder) are having dinner at what looks like a nightclub repurposed as a restaurant. Michelle ignores him at first, but only because she’s in the company of her daughter. After they get back home, she realizes she “forgot” her credit card and returns to the restaurant. Ryan’s waiting for her. After introductions, he invites her to have a cigarette with him. Michelle tells him she doesn’t smoke, to which Ryan responds: “Yeah, you do.”
Let’s discuss Ryan for a moment. I get that the character is supposed to be self-confident and arrogant, with an air of danger—all qualities someone with a shaky self-esteem and a hankering for excitement might respond to. But Bound has the same problem as Darker Shades of Elise: its male lead immediately comes off as creepy and repellent rather than sexy and mysterious. Draper isn’t bad looking, but he doesn’t project the sexual magnetism his role requires. He’s not so fuckable that one would overlook Ryan’s charmless personality. I can see the desire to fuck Jamie Dornan or even Michele Morrone (were his character not a kidnapper, that is) being so strong one would ignore the warning signs, for one night at least; Draper is easier to resist.
Michelle doesn’t resist, however, and is soon letting Ryan go down on her atop her father’s desk…
 |
|
“I can’t wait for him to ask where all the snail
trails came from!”
|
… and accompanying him to a BDSM sex club, exposing her to the mild side of kink (no fisting, piss play or CBT here).
 |
| Cordelia discovers the Bronze is under new management. |
Ryan’s attempt to fuck her in the alley outside the club, in full view of a guy in a leather face cage, gets a hard no from Michelle. Ryan shows he’s open to compromise and takes Michelle back to his place, which looks like they just re-arranged the sex club set. Though Michelle is cuffed to a chair and blindfolded, the BDSM trappings do little to raise the temp of this lukewarm sex scene. At least Michelle liked it, and soon thereafter she’s ditching boring, stable George for a man who gives strong serial rapist energy.
 |
You just know the Asylum wanted to put a starburst on the
DVD cover, urging people to “See Angel’s Charisma Carpenter
nude!” Too bad Carpenter beat them
to the punch by posing for
Playboy a decade earlier. |
But Michelle’s improved sex life negatively impacts her career. She blew off an important meeting with the head of Elliot and Associates, one that could possibly stave off the sale of her father’s company, to take a tour of the wild side (“wild” if you think French vanilla is daring). A day or so later, she brings Ryan along to a company-sponsored fundraiser. Though the event appears to be held in the entranceway of Michelle’s home, they hire a chauffeur to take them there, and during the ride Ryan gives Michelle a clit vibrator that’s remote controlled, and guess who has the remote?
 |
“Oh, shit. This movie isn’t going to get any
better, is it?”
|
Ryan wastes little time abusing his privilege, revving up the sex toy during Walter’s speech about finding a cure for Alzheimer’s. Ryan later pulls her into a bathroom for a quickie, then insists she not fix her makeup before they rejoin the party, so she steps out of the bathroom with her lipstick smeared down one side of her face like “a messy whore.” And who should be standing in front of the bathroom door but fucking Preston, who introduces Michelle to Jesse (Noel Arthur), the head of Elliot Associates! It should be noted that Preston enjoys Michelle’s humiliation more than Ryan does.
Less amused is Walter, who chastises her for bringing a “drug dealing car thief” to the fundraiser (like Daniel Baldwin can talk). This is not only the first the audience learns of Ryan’s criminal past; it’s also the first time Michelle learns of it, and yet she never comments on this revelation or in any way seems concerned by her lover’s alleged criminal history.
 |
| This is Michelle and Ryan, two scenes later. |
What ultimately brings an end to this toxic relationship is Michelle suggesting some role reversal. How about if she spanked Ryan? Ryan coldly tells Michelle to leave, then goes after someone even more vulnerable: Michelle’s daughter Dara.
Bound is neither as terrible as I thought it would be nor as fun as I’d hoped. Carpenter does what she can, but her performance seems less committed as the movie goes along, as if she realized midway through that there’s no polishing this turd, so why bother? Even with the f-bombs and nudity, it feels like a Lifetime movie, and not a particularly well-made one. The movie seems to have a particularly hard time grasping how time works: it’s nighttime when Michelle arrives home from work, but once inside her house the mid-day sun is shining through her kitchen window. Later in the movie, the camera shows the clock on Michelle’s office wall moving from 1:50 to 4:20 p.m., right before Michelle makes 2 p.m. lunch appointment for that same day. Michelle travels further back in time to drop by a Terrell Owens-hosted pool party (sure, why not) to see Ryan on her way to this 2 p.m. appointment, telling him she can only stay a minute because the restaurant where she has her meeting is 30 minutes away. It’s like a math word problem that only has wrong answers.
 |
The nipple clamps of vengeance.
|
To the movie’s credit, it doesn’t pretend its story is a romance, acknowledging that Ryan and Michelle’s relationship is abusive. In a scene in which Michelle returns to the sex club for some independent research, a dominatrix warns her that Ryan isn’t in for the kink; he’s a predator. “People like Ryan give people like us a bad name.”
Bound’s messaging is still a bit dicey, suggesting that abusive relationships are merely character-building. Nevertheless, it was fun to see Michelle finally beat shithead Ryan with his own cat o’nine tails, though I still felt she was a little too merciful. It’s a scene that would’ve benefitted with the addition of a
crocosaurus.
Torn Between Two Kidnappers
Bad as Bound is, it at least has a story to tell, with a beginning, middle and end within a compact 90 minutes. There are now three movies in the 365 Days franchise and there’s not a complete, cohesive narrative among them. THE NEXT 365 DAYS is like trying to fuck while drunk: it never gets good, and it never finishes.
In This Day’s climactic gun battle, Laura (Anna-Maria Sieklucka) was shot by her husband/kidnapper’s ex-girlfriend Anna, whereupon Nacho (Simone Sussina)—not a gardener but the son of a rival Mafia family—shot and killed Anna. Massimo (Michele Marrone), a.k.a. Scowly, then shoots his twin brother Adriano (also Marrone), a.k.a. Twitchy. At the beginning of The Next 365 Days, it’s revealed that Adriano, who took a bullet in his shoulder, is dead, while Laura, whose liver was aerosolized, survived, suffering only a barely perceptible scar and a bad dye job. When Scowly checks on her, she wakes up and immediately she wants to fuck.
 |
Americans struggle to get insurance coverage
for insulin but Laura is provided false eyelashes
while recovering from a near-fatal wound. Healthcare
really is so much better in Europe.
|
Remarkably, Massimo urges Laura to cool it; she’s still recovering, after all. Laura storms out of the bedroom in a snit and joins her pal Olga (Magdalena Lamparska, even more annoying this time out) on the patio, because I guess Olga now lives with them permanently (for those who give a shit, Olga has “changed her mind” about marrying Domenico, though I don’t know if that means she is or isn’t marrying him and the movie never clarifies the matter). Olga tells Laura they were all afraid of losing her and Laura says she’s grateful to have a second chance. Then Olga says what I was thinking: “More alcohol! I can’t look at that hair sober.”
In stunning turn of events, a makeover montage does not follow. Instead, the movie cuts immediately to the after, when Laura, hair done and wearing a sexy black dress, interrupts Scowly’s meeting with his fellow gangsters and asks her beloved kidnapper to see her when he’s done. Though Scowly was just hours earlier refusing to give Laura a hot meat injection for fear it might put her back in the ICU, he immediately excuses himself from his meeting to go fuck the bejesus out of his horny wife (time code 10:20, but it’s not really worth it).
 |
What’s up with that tarp? Are Scowly’s loads so huge
the walls need protecting?
|
But just when it looks like the couple are about to rekindle that moment in Laura’s initial captivity when she said, “Fuck it, he’s hot,” she gets a call from Nacho, who, interestingly, also kidnapped Laura, albeit in a friendlier fashion. Laura later spots Nacho at a nightclub but is intercepted by Scowly before she can say hello. Later, Scowly accuses Laura of cheating on him with Nacho, plus he’s pissed that she didn’t tell him about being pregnant. Laura snaps that she lost their baby because of
his enemies. It’s so sad to see a criminal and his victim fighting.
 |
Laura Torricelli: Businesswoman.
|
There’s an attempt at make-up cunnilingus later, but Scowly intuits (through taste?) that her thoughts are elsewhere, and he’s correct: Laura is fantasizing about Nacho eating her pussy. And so begins the cold war between the Torricellis. Since the lives of these “characters” revolve almost exclusively around fucking, Laura and Scowly must find other ways to pass the time while giving each other the silent treatment. Laura, remembering she was given a fashion house for Christmas in
This Day, decides to throw herself into her business, while Scowly pursues other interests: jacking off in the shower and snorting cocaine.
The rest of the movie is devoted to Laura trying to decide between two kidnappers. Since those are the only two options (the third, more sensible option of escape, followed by intense therapy, is never on the table), it should be a no-brainer: Nacho. Sure, he kidnapped her, but he at least made it appear like he was rescuing her, and he’s way more pleasant, besides. Also, in all the sex scenes in which Nacho appears (three in fantasy, one real), he seems to be a more giving lover (Scowly fucks like he’s late for an appointment). Alas, The Next 365 Days can’t make it that easy, or that final. I’m saddened to report that this one also ends on a cliffhanger, meaning there could be fourth one of these things.
 |
Massimo Torricelli: Pud pounder.
|
That the possibility of a fourth installment of this supposed erotic franchise fills my heart with dread should tell you all you need to know.
The Next 365 Days isn’t quite as offensive as its predecessors, but only because the movie brushes the circumstances of Laura and Scowly’s first meeting in
365 Days under a cum-stained rug and never acknowledges them. Plus, this franchise gets less and less engaging each time out so by this point I couldn’t even work up the energy to be mildly annoyed by its fucked-up sexual politics.
 |
If you think getting drunk and screaming a lot
is funny, then you’re in for a treat: The Next
365 Days features 30% more Olga.
|
About the only thing
The Next 365 Days has going for it is featuring more Nacho—or rather, more nude scenes from Sussina. If you were to just watch the scenes with him and Sieklucka together, you might even mistake this movie for being the erotic romance it’s pretending to be. It’s a good thing, too, because Marrone has noped out of doing any nude scenes for this one, and Sieklucka gets naked less frequently. Had directors Barbara Bialowas and Tomasz Mandes (really, it took
two directors?) not included some sex scenes involving superfluous characters and/or extras the movie would be in danger of having a whole 20 minutes go by without any simulated humping. If you think that’s a complaint, it’s not. I’ll take gratuitous sex scenes over pointless montages—or “comic relief” from Olga—any day. Unfortunately, whether people are bumping uglies or slow walking into a restaurant, it’s going to be soundtracked to irritating Europop with godawful lyrics like:
“Kiss me like a stranger/Come and taste my flavor/You don’t need no chaser/Just vibe on my danger.” There are no fewer than 27(!) songs featured on the soundtrack. The original cast recording of
Evita only had 23, and that’s a fucking musical.
The “Good Parts”
 |
Psych! This is as far as they go.
|
22:30: In the VIP room of a nightclub, Laura fondles Scowly’s crotch while an exotic dancer performs. She then joins the dancer on stage, acting like she’s about to treat Scowly—and the audience—to some girl-on-girl action, only to dismiss the dancer so she and Scowly can have some hard-pounding (but fully-clothed) sex.
 |
A box lunch with Nacho.
|
30:19: Laura dreams of Nacho going down on her, and the scene really does Sussina’s ass justice. The scene transitions into Scowly eating out Laura for “real”, but Marrone keeps his pants on for the scene.
 |
Scowly suspects this meal isn’t for him.
|
 |
“Quack like a duck!”
|
39:00: Scowly goes with some of his Mafioso colleagues to a fetish club where lines of coke are served on trays like hors d’oeuvres. He makes out with a silicone-inflated club girl but can’t bring himself to cheat on Laura. The camera instead turns its attention to another guy in Scowly’s booth having a three-way with two latex- and leather-clad women.
41:35: Laura walks in on Emily, the lead designer at her fashion house, getting rammed from behind by a hunky model.
 |
Emily and her boy toy pad the run time.
|
52:10: More fantasy sex with Nacho, this time featuring a full menu of positions: rear entry, missionary and cowgirl, all performed in smoke-filled studio under a tent of bamboo garden netting and lit by a flashlight.
 |
Laura fantasizes of Nacho while the audience has fantasies
of the producers of The Next365 Days hiring a
lighting technician.
|
1:08:23: Real sex with Nacho. You know Laura is really with Nacho because you can actually see what’s going on.
 |
Laura about to get covered in hot Nacho sauce.
|
1:19:08: Laura in the shower. No sex, just titties. (You’re welcome, straight male and lesbian readers.)
1:27:57: Laura is in a ménage à trois with Scowly and Nacho. The guys work their way down Laura’s body, then pause to look into each other’s eyes…and kiss! To the actors’ credit, they fucking go for it. Yes, there is tongue, and not just a little bit. Alas, just as the scene is getting interesting, Laura wakes up, because of course it’s just a dream.
 |
OK, now I’m interested.
|
If there is in fact going to be a fourth movie, I can only hope Scowly and Nacho will make my dreams come true by going all the way. But this is the
365 Days universe; nothing that interesting would be allowed to happen.
 |
The end? That’s about as likely as Sussina and Marrone fucking
on camera.
|
