The Jennifer O’Neill career trajectory has me obsessed. Cover Girl and Eileen Ford model to Rio Lobo in the Summer of ’72, followed by Reincarnation of Peter Proud and a career in Italy, where she made The Innocent and The Psychic before coming back to America and drinking while Disney cut her hair for The Black Hole, losing the part after a car crash on the way home. She’s also in A Force of One opposite Chuck Norris, and in Scanners before she was in Cover Up opposite Jon-Erik Hexum, who accidentally killed himself on set.

Married nine times to eight husbands, she’s been through lifelong pain from a horse riding injury, postpartum depression that led to electroshock therapy, an abortion, accidentally shooting herself, a husband who abused her daughter and becoming a born-again Christian. Today, she is part of Hope & Healing at Hillenglade, an equine therapy foundation in Nashville, Tennessee, that helps war veterans. She also turns up in religious and right-wing (and they can be both) movies like Time Changer, Last Ounce of Courage and Reagan.

Anyways…

In 1992, she could be the lead in an erotic thriller, playing Hillary Wayne, a reporter who is trying to write about prison reform. She hires an assistant who has been in jail, Alex Pruitt (Robby Benson), without knowing he’s been obsessed with her forever. He’s also super into her actress daughter Vickie (Lydie Denier, who was Jane on Tarzan and Nicole on Alculpco H.E.A.T., plus Midnight Cabaret, Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue and David Prior’s Night Trap), who has a thick French accent for reasons unknown. I’m not demanding the JCVD treatment, where you spend ten minutes in every movie learning why Jean Claude speaks like that, but maybe a little explanation would go a long way because Vickie is sometimes unintelligible.

Hillary is already in one bad relationship with her editor Brian (Ian Oglivy, Witchfinder General), and now, her daughter is drama-coached by the jailbird with a video camera. That said, Robby Benson is great in this, way better than this movie deserves. He actually creates a character that you care about.

This movie had to have been cast just for me. Beyond O’Neill, John Agar shows up as an old criminal. I was expecting John Carradine to be in this, but he died in 1988, not that this ever stopped him from being in a movie.

Lydie Denier has claimed that her sex scene with Robby Bensen was the most erotic she had filmed, and he didn’t do promotion for this movie because it got him in trouble. Maybe she means the total creep scene where he forces her to wear her mother’s underwear.

Director Kevin Meyer also made Perfect Alibi, in which Lydie Denier cucks Teri Garr. Wait, what’s the female term for cucking? According to Wikipedia, “A cuckquean is the wife of an adulterous husband (or partner for unmarried companions), and the gender-opposite of a cuckold.” I don’t like that word. It needs a new word. Meyer also made Under Investigation, which stars Harry Hamlin, Ed Lauter, Joanna Pacula and, you knew it, Lydie Denier.

I love that Robby Benson is the voice of Disney’s The Beast and here he is, ruining a family.

You can watch this on Tubi.