I love an auteur project. And I love an erotic thriller. So when my star vehicle chocolate gets into the sexy peanut butter, I’m all over it.

George Saunders started his entertainment career as a professional ballet dancer with the San Francisco Ballet and attended NYU and Juilliard. His IMDB bio states he’s “very proud to have worked with the Navy Seals through the Coronado Special Warfare Center and the men and women of the U.S. Army and the Marines during his involvement with Military Films.”

By the 1990s, he was making his own movies, including Street Angels and Vendetta. So, of course, he’d find his way to the erotic thriller, as it’s a genre that always sells.

Jennifer (Nicole Gian) and Charlie (Saunders) are in a dying marriage, the result of him shooting and killing a teenage intruder and the resulting PTSD. So when Tina (Lisa Boyle) moves in to rent a room and John (Dan Frank) gets a home nearby, you can see that our protagonists will stray with them.

Yet this is where the Giallo shows itself in the DNA of the erotic thriller; Tina and John are no strangers. And they have a plan. What it has to do with Charlie killing that burglar, him being a photographer who hasn’t had any inspiration, or the marriage failing, well, there are enough twists and turns to make this somewhat memorable.

As for the script, Charlie tells Tina, “I know you need it hot and steamy. Your glass of milk, I mean.” She replies, “I can’t stand a cold glass of milk at night. You’d have to handcuff me to the bed to get me to go to sleep.” This is where the saxophone starts playing.

Joe Bob spoke up for this movie in his 1996 Drive-In Awards, as Saunders was nominated for Best Actor — “the haunted artist surrounded by nekkid women who can’t understand why he gets so much sex in one movie.” This was also up for Best Movie — “the story of a scruffy, frustrated painter who keeps having these nightmares about the young burglar he blew away three months ago, then rents out a room in his beach house to an oversexed bombshell who teaches him the real meaning of Aardvarkus Suburbicus.” as well as Best Femme Fatale — “* Nicole Gian, Intimate Deception, as the wily but sexually frustrated wife who likes to lurk in the neighbor’s bushes” and Most Breasts at 33.

And yet, according to The Schlock Pit, who interviewed Saunders, it wasn’t sexy enough to sell to Playboy. He told the site, “We made many good deals, both overseas and domestically, but we did not get a Playboy deal. Why? You will like this: not enough hard fucking. You be the judge! I tried, but perhaps I came off as too romantic…”