Cigars, Loud Jackets and Poontang

This an instance where you can judge
a movie by its don’t-give-a-shit cover art.

There were many ways I could’ve spent the U.S. Election Night: Obsessively checking my phone for updates, watching TV news to see how many different ways anchors could say, “No, not yet,” or just getting drunk. I chose to watch a shitty 1993 direct-to-video thriller, SOUTH BEACH.

Fred Williamson stars as Mack Derringer, a retired pro football player who now runs a private investigation agency with another ex pro football player, Lenny (Gary Busey). When we meet them, they’re playing a round of golf, smoking cigars and talking shit. The two pals are seemingly without a care in the world, even though they have plenty of reasons to worry. As Lenny points out, they haven’t had a case in five weeks, a payment is due on Mack’s houseboat and their bar tab at their favorite watering hole, The Sports Page, “is as long as a tapeworm.” Mack isn’t worried, though, telling Lenny that “big things can happen at any time.”

Then Lenny leaves for a Jamaican vacation, and though his timing is questionable his departure helps ensure the amount of Gary Busey in the movie is kept to a tolerable level. Mack then takes his wheelchair-bound mom (Isabel Sanford) to the mall. He leaves her parked outside a store while he goes shopping in what looks like a Hallmark card shop, but Mama Derringer just can’t stay put, rolling to the jewelry store next door, where she witnesses a robbery in progress. 

Fred Williamson chews more cigars in South Beach, but
Gary Busey chews more scenery.

An alarm goes off and Mack rushes out of the Hallmark store, his gun drawn, though he has no idea the reason for the alarm. I mean, for all he knows, it’s a fire alarm. Anyway, Mack blows away the mullet-headed robbers, police Det. Coleman (Robert Forster, who worked with Williamson in the far superior Vigilante) lets Mack know he’s sick of his shit, and Mama Derringer hams it up for the local TV news.

Meanwhile, Mack’s ex-wife Jennifer (Vanity), who manages a phone sex business, is being stalked by one of her callers, a guy identifying himself as Billy. Jennifer dismisses the stalker as an annoyance, until she shows up at work one day, wearing a slinky black dress with matching opera gloves, as one does, and discovers the naked corpse of her dim-bulb co-worker Suzi on the office floor. 

It was Nightclub Wednesday at the office.

You might think, as I did, that hunting for Suzi’s killer/Jennifer’s stalker would become the main driver of South Beach’s story, but that’s merely a B-plot. At the Sports Page, while cutting up with his buddy Jake (a barely recognizable Peter Fonda), yet another former pro ball player, Mack is approached by Francesca (Sheree Deveraux, who, despite what her name and acting style suggests, did not do porn). She wants to hire Mack to protect her from a jealous ex-boyfriend. He reluctantly agrees, because pussy, and accompanies her to a party aboard a yacht.

It’s a set-up, of course, and before the party is over Francesca has disappeared and Mack is framed for a murder. With Jake’s help, Mack goes hunting for the person who framed him, getting occasional too-convenient-to-be-true assists from Lenny. He might also try to find out who’s after Jennifer, and, what the hell, go after the people behind that jewelry store robbery since the helmet-haired daughter of the store’s owner (Shay King) so obviously wants to get into Mack’s Dockers. 

Shay King’s movie career consists solely of
supplying South Beach’s nudity.

These three storylines—Mack being framed, Jennifer’s stalker and the jewelry store robbery—are loosely wrapped up by the end, but don’t ask me to explain how because the movie sure doesn’t, not coherently, at least. But South Beach isn’t about the destination; it’s the meandering journey, during which our leading man models loud jackets, chews through about thirty cigars and considers all the sweet poontang he’s offered, including the well-seasoned meat pocket of Stella Stevens (watching the 54-year-old throw herself at Williamson is only slightly less cringey than the scene featuring Marquis Ross’s beachside rap performance).

Stella Stevens is actually a more age-appropriate partner for
Fred Williamson, but the movie pretends she still looks
like her 1960s self (right).

A Black Burt Reynolds

South Beach seems to be going for a vibe similar to one of Burt Reynolds’ ’80s crime movies, a mix of gritty action and smartass humor. It certainly sold me on the idea of Williamson as a Black Burt Reynolds. His ’stache isn’t as iconic and he lacks a signature laugh, but Williamson projects the same blend of no-bullshit machismo and easy-going humor as Burt. I could easily see him playing the lead in Stick or Heat.

Peter Fonda and Fred Williamson are just
a couple of zany bros.

Unfortunately, I could just as easily see Reynolds in South Beach, which more closely resembles the DTV shit he was making by the late 1990s. Michael Thomas Montgomery’s script, with its muddled plotting and underwritten characters, is partly to blame for the movie’s poor quality. I say partly because I suspect there were more than a few sequences that were improvised, e.g., the opening golf scene. And, honestly, can any scene involving Gary Busey really stay on script? Casting Busey in a movie after his 1988 motorcycle accident is like giving your best man a microphone at your wedding reception after he’s downed his sixth glass of Prosecco with a cocaine chaser. Semi-coherence is the best you can hope for.

But most of the blame goes to the director… Fred Williamson (IMDb lists Alain Zaloum as a co-director, though his name doesn’t appear on the movie’s opening credits). As cool as he is in front of the camera, Williamson isn’t so capable behind it. South Beach is sloppily made, with flubbed lines and visible safety rigging. There’s also an over-reliance on close-ups and waaaaay too many shots of Williamson grinning into the camera and handling a fucking cigar (seriously, I think he’s a fetishist about those things). 

One of the few scenes in South Beach that’s not
shot in close-up, and it captures the stunt man’s safety
rigging and filming equipment in the background.

 

 

South Beach has an interesting cast, at least. The movie can now boast that it stars three Oscar® nominees (Busey for The Buddy Holly Story, Fonda for Ulee’s Gold, and Forster for Jackie Brown), plus an Emmy winner (Sanford for The Jeffersons) and a Golden Globe winner (Stevens, but the category was Most Promising Newcomer, the Hollywood equivalent of being crowned homecoming queen). Vanity never won any awards but she boned Prince, so that’s got to count for something. I always found her a welcome screen presence, and wish she was more of one in South Beach, her next to last movie before she quit cocaine and show business to become an evangelist (no one ever turns to God when things are going great). Rounding out the cast are cameos from Henry Silva and Flash Gordon star Sam J. Jones. The movie also has the distinction of having a high body count amongst its cast: Sanford, Forster, Fonda, and Vanity are now all deceased, and yet Busey is still with us.

Unless you’re a fan of the lead actors you could probably skip this one and re-watch one of their better movies. That said, there were worse things I could’ve watched on Election Night.

Fun fact: South Beach features four actors who have posed
nude for Playboy/Playgirl: Stella Stevens, Fred Williamson,
Vanity, and Sam J. Jones.

Striking Terror in the Hearts of Homophobes

It’s Halloween so I feel compelled to review something seasonally appropriate. The works of Romero, Carpenter and Craven are typical fodder for this sort of thing, or I could look at a couple of Frank Whale and Jacques Tournier films if I wanted to get all New York Times about it (I don’t). Instead, I thought I’d explore a different type of horror director, one who pays homage to horror conventions yet puts his own unique spin on the genre. This Halloween, I’m delving into some select works from David DeCoteau.

No one should watch a David DeCoteau horror movie expecting to be scared. Even his best ones are standouts not because they succeed as horror movies, but because they possess that so-bad-it’s-good magic. Yes, DeCoteau is that kind of filmmaker, occupying the same strata as Fred Olen Ray.

Like FOR, DeCoteau is extremely prolific, with 165 directorial credits to his name as of this writing (FOR only has 159, but he has more writing and acting credits than DeCoteau). Also like FOR, DeCoteau has worked in numerous genres, from hardcore porn to family-friendly Christmas movies. Yet, regardless of the movie’s genre, the era in which it was made, or pseudonym the director uses, there are certain signifiers that reveal a movie as being a DeCoteau product, signifiers that I’ll highlight in the movies below. Though many of these themes and techniques aren’t unique to the director on their own, they are hallmarks of a DeCoteau product when combined with some very specific, recurring tropes.

DREAMANIAC

The moment Thomas Bern realized he
didn’t want to be in movies anymore.

DeCoteau’s first horror movie was this 1986 Nightmare on Elm Street cash-in (one of the movie’s taglines was, “You Don't Have to Live on Elm Street to Have Nightmares”). Adam (Thomas Bern, in his screen debut/swan song), an aspiring heavy metal musician who is never shown playing or listening to it, agrees to let his girlfriend’s snooty sister Jodi (Lauren Peterson) rent his place to host a party for her prospective sorority. When Jodi’s guests arrive it’s soon evident that the sorority she wants to join is Phi Kappa Kunt. “Do I know you?” Jodi’s sister Pat (Kim McKamy) asks Francis (Dixie Carter lookalike Cynthia Crass), a sorority member bedecked in a giant foreskin. “I doubt it,” Francis sniffs. “I went to private schools all my life and I’m rich as shit.” The men attending this party don’t fare much better, being either dorky, goofy or smarmy. Only Pat is remotely likable, though I found her initial interaction with Adam to be borderline abusive.

Julia Sugarbaker goes to college.

Luckily for the good of humanity, Adam’s also into black magic (don’t let that Def Leppard tee fool you) and has summoned a succubus, Lily (Sylvia Summers), who’s down to fuck and/or kill the party guests, though she drags her feet doing either. Among the notable-but-improbable kills: Lily entices one of the hotter guys, Ace, to strip down to his tighty whities, wraps an extension cord around him and electrocutes him, somehow. Another head-scratching kill scene has a character getting decapitated by a power drill.

Though Dreamaniac has a few OK practical effects (it’s one of DeCoteau’s bloodier movies, though that “too gory for the silver screen” tag on the poster art is total bullshit), whatever schlocky potential it may have had is dashed by Helen Robinson’s lame script, the high school play-caliber acting and heavily padded runtime. That it was shot on video doesn’t help, though the quality of its cinematography is more early ’80s porn movie than shot on shitteo. That said, the picture is still pretty murky and fuzzy, making it even more of a chore to watch. 

What makes a David DeCoteau film unique? Exhibit A.

Story-to-Runtime Ratio: Barely 40 minutes of story to an 82-minute runtime. (I swore when I first watched it the movie was 1 hour, 42 minutes, but maybe it just felt that long.)

Method(s) Used to Pad Runtime: Repeated footage; footage of people walking/running; repeated footage of people walking/running; slooooow pans; even slower opening and end credits.

Kim McKamy considers whether porn
might be less demeaning.

Has Been/Porn Star in Cast: Kim McKamy took the name Ashlyn Gere in 1990 and had a long career in adult video.

Homoerotism Level: Lower side of medium, though after executive producer Charles Band screened the movie someone from his office called DeCoteau and asked, “Are you gay?”

Percentage of Runtime Male Cast Members in Underwear: Less than 10%, though Dreamaniac has more male nudity than other DeCoteau titles.

Will it Scare Homophobes? They may bitch about the amount of man-ass on display, but otherwise, no.

THE KILLER EYE

Ryan Van Steenis never saw the Eighth
Dimension coming.

DeCoteau takes the 1950s drive-in creature feature into the craptastic direct-to-video market of 1999, spicing it up with a heavy helping of homoeroticism and a generous side of naked women. Right off the bat we have “mad” scientist Grady (Jonathan Norman) hiring a hustler (pouty twink Ryan Van Steenis) to be his lab rat. “Are you sure you wouldn’t rather screw, Doc?” the hustler asks. “’Cause my rates are the same.” Unfortunately for him, Grady wants a test subject, not a blowjob. The scientist administers eye drops that should, if successful, give the subject a view into “the Eighth Dimension.” Instead, the drops transport an entity from the Eighth Dimension into the blonde twink’s eye, causing it swell so large that it pops from his head and becomes sentient. (I just wrote that!)

Grady, however, was too busy arguing with his horny wife Rita (“You want to talk about you and your orgasms now?”) to notice any of these developments. It’s only after Rita (Jacqueline Lovell) leaves to have a three-way with their downstairs neighbors, hunky stoners Tom and Joe (David Oren Ward and Roland Martinez, respectively), that Grady notices his subject is now dead. So, he calls his assistant Morton (Kostas Koromilas), who conveniently lives in the same building, to, well, assist him, much to the chagrin of Morton’s young wife Jane (Nanette Bianchi). Though it would seem that a giant floating eyeball would be hard to miss, quite some time passes before it’s discovered, even though it’s frequently hovering only a few feet away, using its phallic-like optic nerve to get Rita off while her two stoned studs doze on either side of her, then feel up Jane while she showers. 

A typical night with Jerry Falwell Jr., his wife
and their pool boy.

Meanwhile, Creepy Bill (Blake Adams, billed here as Blake Bailey), a guy who, near as I could tell, just hangs out in the apartment building’s attic, happens upon the dead hustler’s body. Because Bill’s not quite right in the head, he has no interest in blackmailing Grady (“When you tell on others, you’re just telling on yourself,” he says). Instead, he joins the search for the titular Killer Eye, which at this point is more accurately described as the Creeping Molesting Eye. Rita, Tom, Joe and Jane join their efforts to trap the giant eye, to no avail. (“It’s been floatin’ and fucking for hours, so it’s got to be getting tired,” observes Creepy Bill.) But it soon becomes quite obvious that one member in their group has no interest in stopping the sentient eyeball.

The giant, phallic eyeball from
the Eighth Dimension.

This one’s kind of fun, actually. The movie knows what it is and does what it can within its limited budget, managing to deliver a few laughs in the process. It doesn’t do it efficiently, however. For all the amusing moments, there are just as many sluggish, pointless ones. The acting is weak, but still leagues above what was seen in Dreamaniac, with several cast members delivering semi-professional performances.

Story-to-Runtime Ratio: Really only enough story here to support 70 of this movie’s 90 minutes.

Method(s) Used to Pad Runtime: Extended PG-13 sex scene; extended R-rated shower scene; repeated footage, especially of that big rubber eye; slooooow pans; even slower end credits.

Has Been/Porn Star in Cast: Jacqueline Lovell worked in adult film under the name Sara St. James.

Homoerotism Level: High (see below).

#NoHomo

Percentage of Runtime Male Cast Members in Underwear: David Oren Ward and Roland Martinez never once put on pants, so a good 30-40%.

Will it Scare Homophobes? They’ll definitely be nervous, though Lovell and Bianchi are well utilized as the movie’s beards.

VOODOO ACADEMY

The spirit of Voodoo Academy
possesses Chad Burris.

Much like this movie’s young protagonist when he enrolls in the Carmichael Bible College, my husband and I didn’t fully know what we were getting into when we rented this DeCoteau offering in the early 2000s. We knew it was trash, of course, and our expectations were appropriately low, but then we started watching it and soon realized we’d happened upon a true hidden gem.

Like The Killer Eye, this 2000 release takes a premise that would’ve been common on the movie screens of yesteryear and pulls it into the 1990s, with DeCoteau putting his own, unmistakable spin on the material.

Christopher Sawyer (Riley Smith) is a devotee of Rev. Holice Carmichael’s “Neurocystic Christian Church” (a mix of Catholicism and Scientology, as one character describes it), so he’s thrilled to be accepted into the reverend’s bible college. Of course, the school’s extremely small, all-male student body — Christopher would be the school’s sixth student — is a bit of a red flag, but Mrs. Bouvier (Debra Mayer), the school’s sole administrator, explains that’s only because Carmichael Bible College is still an experimental institution. The school isn’t even accredited yet, another red flag, as is Rev. Carmichael’s sudden introduction of confessional booths. And seeing how the Rev (Chad Burris, who looks like he could be Jeff Stryker’s little brother) interacts with his students — placing hands on their muscular thighs, fixing his seductive gaze on their young, handsome faces — you just know those booths have a glory hole. 

Kevin Calisher looks over Carmichael
Bible College’s newest student.

It’s not until Christopher’s hunky classmates succumb to the effects of drugged wine (Christopher, a staunch teetotaler, abstained), and begin writhing in masturbatory torment that the devout new student decides to investigate. When one of the students, Rusty (Huntley Ritter), walks, zombie-like, upstairs to Mrs. Bouvier’s apartment (“That’s it, Rusty, follow your urges,” Mrs. B intones), Sawyer follows and discovers the truth: Carmichael Bible College isn’t a religious school at all—it’s a front for a voodoo priestess, and its students are all sacrifices to Macudo!

Simply put, Voodoo Academy is DeCoteau’s masterwork, second only to his one stab at indie legitimacy, 1997’s Leather Jacket Love Story. While the acting isn’t that good (it’s still a DeCoteau movie), the male cast gamely sells the homoerotism, especially Burris and, as class smartass Billy, Kevin Calisher. What’s amazing about this movie is that though its content is relatively tame, it’s so heavily suggestive that by the time the final credits roll you’ll swear you saw the guys suck each other off.

The boys of Voodoo Academy can’t fight the feeling.

Story-to-Runtime Ratio: Though 92 minutes is a wee bit longer than it needs to be (80 minutes is closer to the mark), Voodoo Academy doesn’t overstay its welcome. 

Rusty is swiftly punished for following his urges.

Method(s) Used to Pad Runtime: Lingering shots of guys writhing in their underwear; repeated footage; extended opening credits; slooooow pans.

Has Been/Porn Star in Cast: Despite all the guys in the cast looking like they were plucked from Chi Chi LaRue’s stable, none of them have done porn. Debra Mayer was in several Full Moon films prior to her death in 2015, but no porn.

Homoerotism Level: Were it any higher it would be hardcore gay porn.

Percentage of Runtime Male Cast Members in Underwear: Oh, 60%, easy.

Will it Scare Homophobes? They’ll be fucking terrified.

EDGAR ALLEN POE’S HOUSE OF USHER

Frank Mentier and Michael Cardelle make
awkward, awkward love.

With his 2008 retelling of the famous Poe tale, DeCoteau doesn’t waste time with mere homoeroticism. This one’s motherfuckin’ gay! What’s more, he made it for Here! TV, the gay network that gave us the wonderfully terrible series Dante’s Cove and The Lair. Was I giddy at the prospect of watching this? You bet your Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs!

Unfortunately, Here! TV didn’t get the director of Voodoo Academy; it got the director of the 1313 series. DeCoteau’s interest in the material doesn’t go much further than cashing a paycheck, so what should have been a campy homo horror is a boring slog. He couldn’t even be bothered to eliminate the street traffic noise from scenes that are supposed to be taking place in the gardens of a remote country estate.

Part of the movie’s undoing is its casting. Frank Mentier, as the eccentric Roderick Usher, and Michael Cardelle, as his childhood friend Victor Reynolds, are emblematic of DeCoteau’s erotomania: buff, smooth and young. While Cardelle does look good in boxer briefs — because of course DeCoteau’s going to get him stripped down to his underwear — it’s nigh impossible to believe that his character has traveled the world and seen some shit when we suspect the actor playing him is filming his scenes during his high school spring break (and, based on Cardelle’s performance, between bong hits). Mentier, looking and sounding more bored than stoned, appears to be slightly older — he was possibly on his spring break from university — but not much more believable. These characters needed to be played by men who could act, not boys who could not. Jaimyse Haft, as Roderick’s sister Madeline, tries to deliver a real performance, bless her heart, but, alas, she just doesn’t quite have the acting chops to pull it off.

Who farted?

OK, I know better than to watch DeCoteau’s movies for the acting, but when so little regard is shown for all other production aspects (the script, art direction, the pacing) you become less forgiving. The one possible saving grace House of Usher had was its sex scenes, something to appease the viewers until there’s a Next Door Studios’ House of Usher, but again DeCoteau drops the ball. Mentier makes out with both Cardelle and a blonde whatsisname, yet it barely qualifies as softcore. The actors never even remove their underwear, instead yanking them below their buttocks but keeping their genitalia covered. You’d think a man who has directed gay porn would have a better grasp of the mechanics of sex. I wasn’t expecting to see any dicks, but I thought we could get sex scenes that reached the same level of explicitness as a Shannon Whirry erotic thriller, or, you know, Dante’s Cove.

Unless you share DeCoteau’s fondness of cute guys walking around in their underwear, House of Usher isn’t even worth hate watching. Better to stick with Roger Corman’s 1960 adaptation. Or try your luck with this 1989 adaptation or this one from 2006, both movies looking like they deliver the fun kind of bad DeCoteau didn’t. If nothing else, the acting should be better.

Michael Cardelle reminds us we’re watching
a David DeCoteau movie.

Story-to-Runtime Ratio: Though there should be enough story to flesh out an 84-minute movie, Simon Savory’s uninspired script, coupled with the sluggish pacing and bad acting, make House of Usher barely tolerable for one hour.

Method(s) Used to Pad Runtime: Repeated footage; lingering shots of guys in their underwear; people walking; extended softcore sex scenes; slooooow pans.

Has Been/Porn Star in Cast: Jill Jacobson of Falcon Crest fame(?) has a cameo so inconsequential it’s insulting.

Homoerotism Level: Extremely high.

Percentage of Runtime Male Cast Members in Underwear: 50%, augmented with some male rear nudity, but neither helps.

Will it Scare Homophobes? Yes, but they’ll be bored soon enough. 

Boo!

Dreamaniac and The Killer Eye are currently streaming on Tubi.

The Unofficial ‘Baywatch’ Movie

The only thing actually at the beach in
this poster is the ocean.

It’s Labor Day weekend in the U.S., which doesn’t really mean anything in the Age of COVID-19 except that we can count on seeing depressing repeats of the videos we saw during spring break and Memorial Day weekend*. Those not interested in actively thinning the herd can experience the beach vicariously with any number of beach movies, from cheesy classics like Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), to the less classic Spring Break (1983). Maybe re-watch Jaws (1975) and imagine the shark chowing down on covidiots. If you’re in a thoughtful mood, check out John Milius’ surfer film Big Wednesday (1978), and the dramedy The Way, Way Back (2013) is supposed to be pretty good, I hear.

Or you could just say fuck quality and watch the 1992 Australian movie WET AND WILD SUMMER!

Wet and Wild is not much of a film. It is, however, something of an unofficial Baywatch movie, made decades before 2017’s official big screen adaptation starring Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson and Zac Efron. Even its a.k.a., Exchange Lifeguards, suggests the movie was angling to ride on Baywatch’s rescue cans.

Full disclosure before I continue: my knowledge of Baywatch comes solely from Allison Pregler’s Baywatching YouTube series, in which Pregler does hilarious capsule reviews of each episode of Baywatch and its ill-fated spinoff, Baywatch Nights. Though I’ve never seen a single full episode of Baywatch proper, Pregler’s series has convinced me that should I ever become incapacitated I want a loved one to buy me the box set of the series. I can think of nothing better to watch while I’m recovering from a heart attack or waiting for the cancer to finish its job, as I feel Baywatch is the one series that could make me glad to be alive and welcome death simultaneously.

Though Wet and Wild Summer! has a lot in common with Baywatch—a lifeguard-centric theme, hot bodies in swimwear, bad writing—it is its own, unique thing. For starters, in Wet and Wild many of the bodies, hot or not, frequently lose their swimwear. And while Baywatch was fond of featuring an Australian cast member (Peter Phelps, Jaason Simmons), Wet and Wild flips the script, featuring an American amidst its cast of Australians.

Wet and Wild’s token American is Christopher Atkins, who was, by 1992, only a few years away from updating the top line of his resume from “Star of Blue Lagoon and Dallas” to “Ex-celebrity/reasonable rates”. Atkins plays Bobby McCain, son of real estate developer Mike McCain, and to ensure that the audience understands the familial relationship, Bobby refers to Mike as “father” no fewer than three times in less than three minutes. His father, played by Elliott Gould (oh no!), has been acting a little erratic lately, making mud pies on his desk and staring into the sun. Were this 2016, Mike would be announcing a campaign for president, but since it’s the early 1990s—not to mention Mike’s babbling about renewable energy like a goddamn leftist—he’s considered a threat to his company’s survival. So, his second in-command Richard (Christopher Pate) enlists Bobby’s help to push through a deal in Australia’s Mullet Beach. Naturally, the best way to do this is to send Bobby to Mullet Beach as part of a lifeguard exchange program.

“See this here in my hands? This is my career now. I was the star of
M*A*S*H and The Long-motherfuckin’-Goodbye, and now I’m playing
opposite the star of A Night in Heaven. Oh, fuck me.”

Though Bobby left the U.S. wearing a business suit, he arrives in Australia wearing an outback duster coat and cattleman hat because comedy. He also has an alias, Bobby Carter (you weren’t expecting something creative, were you?) At the Mullet Beach Surf Club, fellow lifeguards Mick (Julian McMahon, in his feature film debut) and Kylie (Amanda Benson, billed here as Amanda Newman-Phillips) have some fun by taking Bobby to the nude beach, where clothing isn’t optional, it’s motherfucking forbidden. Atkins, who partially owes his career to onscreen nudity, almost convinces us he’s embarrassed. And here I thought he had no range.

Bobby (Christopher Atkins) is dismayed to find he’ll be
sleeping in a Bert I. Gordon movie.

Julian McMahon shows Christopher Atkins the sights
of Mullet Beach.

Dem asses! From left: Christopher Atkins, Amanda
Newman-Phillips (a.k.a. Amanda Benson) and Julian McMahon.

But it’s Julie (Rebecca Cross), the owner of the Surf Club and the one property owner who hasn’t sold out to the McCain company, whom Bobby really wants to win over. Julie shoots down Bobby’s initial advance yet changes her mind a minute later because they’re thirty minutes into a 96-minute movie; if a clichéd romance is going to happen, they need to get their asses in gear.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S., Mike decides to join his son and leaves for Australia. In his absence Richard, with assistance from his Mike’s wife Donna (Lois Larimore), with whom he’s having an affair, plots to take over the McCain company. “It is my melancholy duty to assume control of McCain World Resorts,” Richard tells the board of directors after explaining Mike is no longer mentally competent to run the company. Mike’s mental decline, by the way, is attributed to some pills Donna gives him, though I’m not sure what medication causes a sudden interest in environmentalism. (The movie’s equating environmentalism with poor mental health might have been funny in its day; today it could just be a talking point pulled from the Koch Brothers’ Twitter feed.)

You can hardly tell that Christopher Pate and Lois Larimore
are supposed to be playing Wet and Wild’s villains,
so subtle are their performances.

There are no surprises ahead as the movie trudges to its conclusion. Are Bobby’s friendships jeopardized when his cover is blown? Check. Do Bobby and Julie have a third act break up? Check. Does Mike McCain’s sudden interest in environmentalism factor into the McCains winning over the locals? Check. Does Bobby’s participation in a competition—the Australian Surf Life Saving Championships in this case—ultimately save the day? Check. Are there montages? You better fucking believe it!

The unfortunate faces of Christopher Atkins.

Wet and Wild’s marketing suggests it’s supposed to be raucous sex comedy, in the vein of Hardbodies or Spring Break, except it’s none of those things. There’s a smattering of scatological humor (e.g., a farting dog), but it’s more lazy than edgy. And though the movie sets expectations high for lots of sexual shenanigans, what with all the bare flesh on display and Bobby being given condoms by both his secretary and his father before leaving for Australia, it quickly loses interest in the characters’ Down Under activities. There’s only one sex scene, between Atkins and Benson, with all other fucking occurring offscreen. As for the laughs … well, I’m sure a dog peeing on a guy or that same guy getting canned dog food stuffed down the front of his underwear might tickle a few giggle boxes, but I imagine even 10-year-olds would roll their eyes and dismiss these scenes as lame. If Baywatch was a drama that was unintentionally hilarious, Wet and Wild is a comedy that’s unintentionally hilarity-free.

One of Wet and Wild’s comic highlights.

Alternate artwork for
Wet and Wild’s alternate title.

At best, Wet and Wild succeeds at being an affable time waster. It’s exactly the type of movie you’d expect Christopher Atkins to be starring in in 1992. Atkins is easily upstaged by his Australian co-stars, though his innate likability almost makes up for his shortcomings as an actor. More baffling is why Elliott Gould is in this thing. Gould was well past his 1970s heyday, but were his finances so dire in the early 1990s that he needed to accept whatever part came his way? At least he got an Australian vacation out of it, because he definitely didn’t work too hard for his Wet and Wild paycheck, obviously having calibrated his performance to fuck it, this ain’t Altman. On a side note: would a dark-haired, Jewish man sire a blond WASP? This is sort of explained away with Bobby’s mother—Mike’s first wife—being a blonde Australian (and, yes, she and Mike do get back together in the end), but it still strains credulity. Mark Hamill or David Soul would’ve been more believable casting choices, is all I’m saying.

The Australian actors fare better, but even hunky Julian McMahon—who later found success in the U.S. in the TV series Profiler, Charmed and Nip/Tuck—can’t elevate Phillip Avalon’s uninspired script above barely watchable.

One other thing that Wet and Wild has in common TV show Baywatch: in spite of all the nudity, it’s weirdly wholesome. One of Pregler’s criticisms of the 2017 Baywatch movie was that making it a hard-R comedy missed the point of TV show’s charm. What made the show so funny, she said, was “the contradictory juxtaposition of TV cheesecake with family-friendly values.” I wouldn’t go so far as to say Wet and Wild is “family-friendly,” but it’s certainly closer in spirit to Baywatch than the raunchy 1980s teen comedies it’s aping. That said, I’d stick with the show Baywatch (or Baywatching), which may not show as much man-ass but are a hell of a lot funnier.

Turns out, there’s a reason Aussie lifeguards
hike their Speedos up their butt cracks, and it’s not just
to entice spectators.

You probably won’t enjoy Wet and Wild this much.

*And lo, it came to pass.

About Racism, or Just Racist?

The first time I encountered the 1975 film MANDINGO was when it was displayed on video store shelves in the 1980s. Judging from the box cover, I assumed it was a Gone with the Wind-style historical romance, synonymous with boring in my teen-aged mind. I didn’t even bother to pick up the box to read the synopsis on the back, let alone rent it. Yet I did rent Rollover, a 1981 “thriller” that has all the pulse-pounding excitement of a federal reserve chairman’s public address, so clearly I wasn’t making the best choices in my teens.

I realized my error much later, in the mid-2000s, when I read about Mandingo in Bill Landis’ and Michelle Clifford’s book The Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square. What they detailed sounded so tasteless I knew I just had to see it. Luckily, though video rentals were on death’s door, there was a place in my area that had a copy. I watched, mouth agape, horrified/amazed at what I transpired on screen. Mandingo is, quite simply, a trash classic. But this was a guilty pleasure that was guiltier than most. It’s easy for me to defend my liking a problematic movie like Cruising because I’m a member of the minority it unfairly portrays. But a white guy saying he, um, liked (was morbidly fascinated by?) Mandingo? That’s harder to sell.

But like Cruising, Mandingo seems to have been retroactively upgraded from insensitive garbage to culturally significant touchstone (though the former’s upgrade may have only happened in James Franco’s mind). In the 2013-2014 season of American Horror Story: Coven, there’s an episode where the character Queenie (Gabourey Sibide), in an attempt to reprogram a resurrected head of infamous slave serial killer Madame Delphine LaLaurie (Kathy Bates), subjects her to an onslaught of TV shows and movies about the Black struggle: Roots, Roots: The Next Generation, The Color Purple and…Mandingo? (BAPS is also included as an ironic choice, making it clear that Mandingo isn’t.)

Wait, Mandingo, the movie Roger Ebert deemed “racist trash,” is being presented as an Important Work? Somehow this was harder to accept than LaLaurie as a bodyless head on a table. At the time I saw that episode, I thought using Mandingo to show horrors of slavery the was akin to using Ilsa, She Wolf of the SS to illustrate the atrocities of the Third Reich.

Sex, Violence and the N-Word

Mandingo isn’t quite as low-brow as Ilsa, but this story about the Falconhurst plantation, owned by father and son slave breeders, Warren and Hammond Maxwell (James Mason and Perry King, respectively), is far from a prestige picture. Warren Maxwell wants three things in life: a cure for his “rheumatiz,” a Mandingo male slave—a “buck,” in the movie’s parlance—and a wife for Hammond. Two of the patriarch’s wishes come true, rather efficiently, in a single road trip Hammond takes with his asshole cousin Charles (Ben Masters), first to a slave auction, to purchase a Mandingo slave, Mede (boxer Ken Norton), then to his cousin Charles’ house for the hasty courtship of Charles’ sister Blanche (Susan George, perhaps the only woman in the antebellum South to have false eyelashes). Handsome though he is, Hammond is shy around some women (“I wouldn’t know what to do, not with no white lady,” he whines to his father), attributed to his self-consciousness about walking with a limp, the result of childhood horse riding accident. Luckily for him he won’t have to work that hard to win Blanche’s hand. She all but greets Hammond at the door in a wedding dress, she’s so eager to get hitched and away from her cash-strapped family and her brother’s boundary issues.

Their marriage is doomed, of course. Hammond blows up when he discovers Blanche isn’t a virgin (“You think I don’t know a virgin when I sleeps with one?”), and he only makes matters worse when, on the return trip to Falconhurst with his new bride and Mede, he picks up another new acquisition, Ellen (Brenda Sykes), as his “bed wench.” Blanche’s disappointment deepens when she discovers that, despite the Maxwell’s wealth, Falconhurst is a shithole. It’s not long before Blanche becomes a bitter, pathetic drunk.

Hammond (Perry King) is self-conscious about his bad leg,
not realizing the women in Mandingo are too focused on
another appendage to notice.

Meanwhile, Hammond, under his father’s tutelage, prepares Mede for a fight in New Orleans, a regimen that includes submersing the slave in near-boiling brine to “toughen his hide,” a scene that also foreshadows for the movie’s grim conclusion. Mede wins his fight, killing his opponent, earning greater respect (but not freedom) from his masters, and resentment from the house slave, Agamemnon (Richard Ward). “Congratulations, Mede,” Agamemnon says upon Mede’s return from New Orleans. “Not every Black man gets the chance to kill another Black man.”

Warren, eager for an heir, then locks Hammond in his wife’s bedroom, ordering the couple to fuck or else (well, words to that effect). For a brief moment, Blanche believes there is hope for their marriage, and chatters at dinner about transforming Falconhurst into the place of elegant parties and elevating the Maxwells’ place in antebellum society. But that hope is fleeting when it’s made clear Hammond has more affection for Ellen than his wife. So, while Hammond is away at a slave auction, Blanche summons for Mede, treating viewers to one more softcore sex scene before the movie’s deadly finale.

Blanche (Susan George) and Mede (Ken Norton) seal their
fates in Mandingo’s final softcore sex scene.

Mandingo’s sequel, Drum, may
have been released by United
Artists, but its production values
are more akin to a Roger
Corman drive-in movie.

The movie is based on Kyle Onstott’s 1957 novel and Jack Kirkland’s 1961 stage adaptation, making Norman Wexler’s screenplay an adaptation of an adaptation, I guess. According to his bio on Wikipedia, Onstott was more interested in writing a bestseller than exposing the horrors of slavery. I’ve read the novel and a few of the Lance Horner-penned sequels—including Drum, which was adapted as Mandingo’s cheaper, tackier sequel in 1976—and they’re pretty much all about abusing slaves and interracial scrompin’ (it’s not called plantation porn for nothing), with dialog that drops the N-word almost as much as it drops consonants. For what it’s worth, the movie is a fairly faithful adaptation of the book, cutting out a lot of the fat from the novel, which was padded with tediously detailed accounts of Hammond shepherding Mede to various fights across the Deep South and Blanche getting drunk with her father-in-law.

But Mandingo’s director, Richard Fleischer, was serious about the movie he was making. “The whole slave story has been lied about, covered up and romanticized so much that I thought it really had to stop,” Fleischer is quoted in a 1976 interview. “The only way to stop was to be as brutal as I could possibly be, to show how these people suffered.”

In all fairness, Mandingo does give an unflinching look at the treatment of slaves like animals (at the movie’s opening a slave trader, played by Paul Benedict, is shown inspecting a selection of potential merchandise for hemorrhoids and then making one fetch a stick like a dog to see how fast he moves), punished for minor infractions (Agamemnon is strung up naked and whipped for learning to read) and, should they escape, murdered upon capture.

Cicero’s (Ji-Tu Cumbuka) final words: “After you hang me,
you can kiss my ass!”

But the movie also has a scene in which Charles, right before beating and raping a female slave, says: “Cousin Hammond, you take the virgin. I don’t care for hard work.” Or how about the advice Warren gets from a doctor for curing his rheumatism: sleep with a slave boy curled around his feet and press his feet hard against the boy to “kindly force the rheumatiz right out the soles.” Considering the shit people believe today you could probably post this advice on Facebook and be guaranteed that a small percentage of people would be pressing their feet against their grandchildren as a rheumatism treatment. But, hey, at least they wouldn’t be using slaves, so, progress.

Because doTERRA wasn’t yet a thing: The patriarch of Falconhurst
plantation, Warren Maxwell (James Mason) tries an unconventional
treatment for his rheumatism

Other pearls of wisdom include Warren’s advice to Hammond about his husbandly duties: “When [your wife] do submit, though, you keep on your shirt and drawers. It plagues a white lady ’most to death to see a man nekkid.” This advice, ironically, is delivered after King’s full-frontal nude scene.

Fortunately, Perry King wasn’t concerned with plaguing the
audience with his nakedness, and neither was Brenda Sykes.

And then there’s Blanche. In a different type of movie, the audience would appreciate how she is also a victim, trapped in a loveless marriage with no means of escape. Her husband can get all the strange he can get it up for with impunity, but the consequences are severe should she have any extramarital affairs. Her only value is being white and pumping out an heir.

But thanks to Wexler’s drive-in caliber screenplay and Susan George’s hysterical performance (she just barely edges out James Mason in the over-Southerning department), Blanche is the source of many of Mandingo’s unintentional laughs.

Occasionally, George dials back her Daisy Mae-zilla performance to allow the audience to see Blanche’s pain. Unfortunately, while George is an attractive woman, she is cursed with a resting (and active) Who Farted? face that’s so aggressive that any expression other than a wide smile suggests she smelt it and dealt it, resulting in more unintentional—and inappropriate—laughs.

 

Culturally Relevant, But Still Trash

One of the arguments given to absolve the plantation porn genre—and its readers—of racism is that white characters are never the winners in the end. That’s usually true, but while the white characters are ultimately punished (there are exceptions), it’s still their story. The slaves’ perspective is secondary. But most people don’t read these books because they condone slavery or racism; they read them because they’re titillating. They appeal to the same part of our lizard brains that attracts us to porn, Tiger King and the Bravo network.

Some versions of Mandingo have
alternate clothed scenes or remove
nudity altogether, because that was
what made the movie offensive.

Yet, Mandingo’s lack of restraint also accounts for its authenticity, an argument Quentin Tarantino made during a 2013 interview on Fresh Air while promoting Django Unchained, a movie that merged slaveploitation and spaghetti western tropes into one bloody revenge fantasy. Because they are striving to remain tasteful, TV movies about the history of slavery, Tarantino said, “keep you at arm’s length dramatically[.] Frankly, oftentimes, they just feel like dusty textbooks barely dramatized.” On the other hand, he added, movies like Mandingo get much closer to the truth. “Having said that, the sensationalistic aspect, and almost [exploitative] aspect of the films can’t be ignored.” (You can hear the whole interview, including the part where Tarantino gets butt hurt after Terry Gross asks him about the excessive violence in his movies in the wake of the Sandy Hook massacre, here.)

In an essay comparing Mandingo to 12 Years a Slave, author James Hannaham, who is Black, comes down, surprisingly, on team Mandingo. “One might well ask whether it isn’t somehow fitting that the exploitation represented by chattel slavery should be represented by an exploitation film,” he writes. 12 Years’ avoidance of its characters’ sexuality, as well as the sexual mores of the time, actually renders its narrative sterile, making it less impactful. As Hanahan concludes in his essay:

“12 Years presents its hero as an entirely honorable victim in an expertly crafted and elegant film, while Mandingo throws us into the ugly mess that slavery and sex create when they collide, among a complicated, unruly, and rude group of tragic characters controlled by the brutality of the social milieu in which they live, their base cravings, and their denial. Its sexual frankness plays on our own attractions to various actors/characters in order to show us how our baser drives can control us in similar ways. It’s hard to deny that the fictional, less carefully handled, more confounding depiction of this time period seems more alive — even if it isn’t as good.”

I recently re-watched Mandingo, and while I still consider it exploitative and uncomfortably campy, I found parts of the movie resonating on a new level. It’s not a big jump to relate the murder of captured slaves to the murder of Black citizens by police, or Blanche exerting her power over Mede to coerce him into having sex, to Amy Cooper using her white privilege when calling police on a Black man in Central Park. I realized my embarrassment over Mandingo was misplaced. It’s not how crudely this 1975 film presented America’s racist past I should be ashamed of, but rather, our racist present.

Even Ten Minutes is Too Long

Our sexual fantasies and our public selves don’t always match up. Incest doesn’t become any less icky with the “between consenting adults” or “the incestuous couple is hot” qualifiers, yet it was the fastest growing trend in pornography in 2018. I have, delicately put, responded to porn videos that I otherwise find disgusting (I have a complicated relationship with the work of Aarin Asker). It’s the taboo that’s exciting. So, the idea that women, even those identifying themselves as feminists, would have rape fantasies or fantasies in which they’re dominated by men, isn’t that far-fetched. It’s when these taboo sex fantasies are inflated into romances that #MeToo becomes #WTF?

One of the earliest mainstream movies to give life to this uneasy coupling of rough muffin buttering fantasy and gauzy romance was the 1986 film adaptation of Elizabeth McNeill’s novel, 9 ½ WEEKS.

From one angle, it reads like the outline for a by-the-numbers Playgirl short story: An attractive woman, successful in her professional life but unfulfilled sexually, meets a handsome, wealthy man who treats her to sumptuous dinners, shopping sprees with no spending limits, and thrusts her into sexual realms no other man had ever dared to, consequently giving her some of the best—perhaps the only—orgasms she’s ever experienced.

Sounds hot! But this is also the outline for a typical Lifetime thriller: A successful career woman meets a handsome, wealthy man who showers her with compliments, woos her with fancy dinners and expensive gifts, and pleasures her with mind-blowing sex. But her prince soon reveals himself to be less charming, treating her like a child, isolating her from her friends and family, demanding she wear what he wants her to wear, punishing her if she disobeys his instructions. The sex games become less playful and more uncomfortable. He is her master and she, his willing slave. Will she come to her senses before it’s too late?

A still from 9 1/2 Weeks, or
a 1980s perfume ad?

The two outlines don’t exactly mesh, do they? I haven’t read McNeill’s novel (there are only so many hours in the day), but based on what I’ve read about it, the Lifetime thriller outline better describes it. The novel was significantly darker, playing out more like a psychosexual horror story than kinky erotica. But “psychosexual horror story” just wasn’t the sort of shit studios were willing to risk financing in the 1980s, so a twisted romance is what we got.

Kim Basinger is Elizabeth, the aforementioned attractive woman. Elizabeth owns a successful gallery, but she’s been adrift in her personal life since her divorce. It’s established right away that Liz is sexually unadventurous, something conveyed by costuming (Elizabeth has a penchant for baggy sweaters) and more directly in dialog, such as when she accuses her roommate and business partner Molly (Margaret Whitton) of being “gross” and “perverted” for suggesting Liz owns a vibrator. That all changes when Liz meets John (Mickey Rourke), a handsome Wall Street broker who arouses her dirty tickle*.

Younger readers might be wondering what “Mickey Rourke” and “handsome” are doing in the same sentence. Hard to believe now, but before he fucked up his face with boxing and plastic surgery, and well before time took its toll, Rourke was actually kind of hot. He didn’t exactly do it for me, but, yeah, I could see why he was cast as the male lead of an erotic romance. Of course, 9 ½ Weeks could just as well starred present-day Mickey Rourke given that it is just one of many, many examples of movies that purport to appeal to the desires of female audiences yet only showcases the bodies women (you ladies just want to see tits, right?).

This is as naked Mickey gets for the entirety of 9 1/2 Weeks.

Looks aside, it’s not entirely clear why Liz puts up with John beyond a couple of dates. As played by Rourke—whose performance falls somewhere between Ben Affleck at the height of his early 2000s douchey-ness and a late-caree,r not-giving-a-shit Bruce Willis—John radiates more smarm than charm. Even if Elizabeth can see past John’s personality, and even if he’s found her G-spot, I still wondered why she didn’t break things off after he pays a carnival worker to leave her parked atop a Ferris wheel while the worker takes a coffee break. She at least responds appropriately when John tells her to face the wall and raise her skirt for a spanking: “Who the fuck do you think you are!?” Alas, she stays, persuaded by John’s phenomenal cunnilingual skills. It’s not until he subjects her to the roving hands of a Latina hooker that Liz loses her shit and runs away, hiding out at a Times Square sex show (no, really).

 Yentl for Protestants: Gentl.

I remember 9 ½ Weeks being hyped prior to its release as pushing the boundaries of what could be shown in an R-rated film. Indeed, the movie had to be cut to avoid an X (and appease fucking test audiences). Now, no one was expecting to see Kim’s split Basinger or Rourke’s erect Mickey, but when the film was finally released it was hard not to find its sex scenes… underwhelming. To director Adrian Lyne’s credit, the sex scenes are quite stylish, but of course they are. Style over substance is Lyne’s thing. (Lyne’s on set emotional manipulation of Basinger is less praiseworthy, even though it worked to the film’s benefit.) The scene where John teases a blindfolded Elizabeth with an ice cube is effective, and Elizabeth masturbating while reviewing art slides as Eurythmics’ “This City Never Sleeps” plays on the soundtrack is another standout scene. Other scenes, like the “sploshing” scene in which John feeds a blindfolded Elizabeth, or when Elizabeth cross dresses, are just silly. But more often than not, 9 ½ Weeks pulls its punches. It’s a movie that shows John and Liz purchasing a riding crop but never shows the couple using it.

No Means No—Unless He’s Hot, Hung and Rich

9 ½ Weeks doesn’t quite succeed as erotica, but it’s not a terrible film, just a tedious one. Screenwriters Patricia Knop, Sarah Kernochan and the late Zalman King (yes, he of The Red Shoe Diaries) don’t sidestep the toxicity of the Elizabeth and John’s relationship, even if they don’t quite sell their attraction beyond she’s pretty and he buys her things and makes her come. Elizabeth has agency, gradually surrendering her free will for love until she realizes that this relationship is costing her soul.

Poland’s answer to E.L. James.

Such character arcs are beyond the grasp of 365 DAYS, a Polish-made Fifty Shades of Grey knockoff currently streaming on Netflix. (I know Fifty Shades would be the more obvious companion to 9 ½ Weeks, complete with a Kim Basinger connection were I to review the whole series, but to do so would require renting the Fifty Shades movies, something I refuse to do. Besides, other people have done a more thorough exploration of both the books and the movies. You can experience one man’s pain for your pleasure here.)

In fact, I’d go so far as to say that most of the basics of storytelling, such as character development and plot, are beyond the grasp of 365 Days, a 114-minute rape fantasy that asks its viewers to accept a woman’s abduction and subsequent captivity by hot-tempered gangster as the springboard for a steamy romance.

“Imagine a strong alpha male who always knows what he wants. He is your caretaker and your defender. When you are with him you feel like a little girl. He makes all your sexual fantasies come true. What’s more, he’s one meter, 90 centimeters tall, has absolutely no body fat, and has been molded by God himself,” our heroine, Laura (Anna Maria Sieklucka), tells her girlfriend.

“Did God mold his dick, too?” the girlfriend asks.

“The devil did,” replies Laura.

Laura fails to bring up that the “strong alpha male” in question, Massimo (Michele Morrone, who can also be blamed for some songs on the soundtrack), also kidnapped her while she was vacationing in Sicily, held her prisoner, tied her up and molested her on a plane (“Sometimes fighting is futile.”), and repeatedly threatened her with physical violence. Also, he’s a Mafia boss who traffics drugs and kills people (but it’s OK, the man he kills is a sex trafficker). Then again, he got her away from her worthless boyfriend and he’s got that devilish dick. All is forgiven!

What makes 365 Days and its inspiration, Fifty Shades, especially repugnant is they conflate abuse with BDSM, rape with rapture.

You would be forgiven for thinking 365 Days was written by a 45-year-old incel while he was under house arrest for violating a restraining order, but no, it was written by a woman. Polish cosmetologist-cum-author Blanka Lipińska, perhaps realizing she could never be the next Olga Tokarczuk, decided to became Poland’s answer to E.L. James instead, writing her own trilogy of dirty books with regressive/offensive sexual politics. I haven’t read any of Lipińska’s novels as they have yet to be translated into English (also, I don’t want to), so I can’t speak to their quality or how close the movie adaptation follows the book. However, Lipińska is credited as a “screenwriting associate” and even has a small cameo in the movie, so I’m going to assume the author is at least OK with how the movie turned out. I’m also going to assume that, based on 365 Days, that Lipińska is the sort of woman who would respond to a friend asking for help out of an abusive relationship by asking what the friend did to provoke the beatings.

Queer Eye for the Stockholm Gal.

There is a small kernel in the existing story that could have, had the screenwriters seized upon it, made 365 Days a lot less problematic. One of Massimo’s henchmen, Domenico (Otar Saralidze), befriends Laura, kind of (this is a movie where shopping montages set to annoying Europop are used in place of character and story development). Had Laura and Domenico formed a romantic bond, with the plot hinging on Domenico helping Laura escape, then 365 Days could have been a palatable romantic thriller. It would definitely be a more exciting one. Instead, the Domenico character is little more than Laura’s occasional chaperone. Guess he didn’t have that satanic cock that Laura craves.

What makes 365 Days and its inspiration, Fifty Shades, especially repugnant is they conflate abuse with BDSM, rape with rapture. If imagining a swarthy, God-built Italian stud ripping your designer panties off against your protests and pile-driving you into multiple transcendent orgasms is what it takes to paddle your pink canoe down river, more power to you. But don’t try to convince us his threatening violence, confiscating your phone and holding you prisoner is romantic. A good rule of thumb: if your story requires a trigger warning for survivors of sexual abuse, your story is not a romance.

There is a sequel for 365 Days planned — Lipińska crapped out a trilogy, after all — so maybe the narrative redeems itself as it goes along, but I doubt it (reportedly, the other books in the series are just more of the same). The one positive thing about this movie compared to its American counterparts is it doesn’t hold back on the explicitness of its sex scenes (no backlit, fully clothed humping here). There’s nothing hardcore, as some reviewers have implied, but it’s definitely in NC-17 territory, unlike some other movies I could mention. And, while their characters display no discernibly human traits, Sieklucka and Morrone are easy on the eyes. So, out of a desire to cater to readers’ prurient interests while also sparing them the chore of watching this piece of shit, here are the time codes for movie’s “good parts”:

10:45 – Laura pleasures herself with a pink vibrator intercut with a scene of Massimo getting blown by a flight attendant. (Warning: even out of context, it’s impossible to pretend the B.J. is consensual.)

43:30 – Laura takes a shower, and Massimo joins her. No sex, just nudity, including some full-frontal flashes from both actors.

51:40 – Laura sexually teases Massimo, then tries to leave the room before closing the deal. Massimo responds by shackling her to the bed and then summoning another woman. The other woman, dressed in generic dominatrix gear, slinks into the room and proceeds to suck off Massimo while a bound Laura watches.

An ass molded by God himself.

1:06:53 – Laura wakes up and smells the Stockholm Syndrome, finally “consenting” to sex with Massimo, the pair going at it for six-plus minutes, a sequence that’s as sleazy as hardcore porn without actually being hardcore.

1:17:30 – A quickie in the bathroom.

1:32:10 – Rear entry while overlooking Warsaw.

You’re welcome.

But, seriously, you’re better off just watching a hardcore porn flick than this glorification of date rape.

Here’s a link to go to in case you or someone you know is a victim of domestic violence: thehotline.org

*I owe Georgina Spelvin a dollar for the phrase “dirty tickle.”