Mannekäng i rött is a 1958 Swedish crime/thriller film directed by Arne Mattson (who six other movies in the series of Hillman-thrillers, starting with The Lady In Black, which star author Folke Mellvig’s detective couple Kajsa and John Hillman) and written by Mellvig.

John and Kajsa Hillman (Karl-Arne Holmsten and Annalisa Ericson) are investigating a series of murders at La Femme, a fashion house filled with secrets, starting with the missing Katja Sundin (Elsa Prawitz), who soon appears with a 17th-century dagger in her back. Once you start to see models disrobing, a blackmail plot, gorgeous color, and a camera roving through all of it, you may wonder if Mario Bava saw this movie. After all, Blood and Black Lace came out five years later. It’s hard to imagine that he never did, as this is the template for that film, minus his even more beautiful camera work and the pornography of violence, a movie based around murder set pieces that would be one of the movies that we now claim as the start of Giallo.

Between this couple who love one another as much as a mystery — and have an assistant named Freddy (Nils Hallberg) — you may think of The Thin Man or Hart to Hart when watching. Obviously, Bava made a much better picture, one that inspired an entire film of bloody psychosexual excess. But hey — inspiration has to come from someplace.

What if Roddy Piper was a Navy SEAL down on his luck who got mixed up with a femme fatale played by Tawny Kitaen in an erotic thriller? Yes, this sounds like an AI movie that I’d write just for myself, but it’s real, and it’s directed by Serge Rodnunsky, who went from being part of the American Ballet Theater with Baryshnikov to making movies like Life After Sex, Rage of Vengeance and, well, this movie.

Also, His brother Jim invented the CableCam that you see moving all over the gridiron during football games.

How can this be any better? What if Trevor Goddard, Kano from Mortal Kombat, was in it? And how about if we got Ator himself, Miles O’Keefe? And Brent Huff, too? What, was Italy too busy for these guys? This is, I can definitely say, a dream cast. This movie is one of Sybil Danning or Jon Saxon, away from being a pantheon.

That said, it does have Camilla More. Yes, Tina Shepherd from Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. And is that stuntman Bob Ivy Bubba Ho-Tep himself? It is! And Juan Fernández, who played The Collector and was in Kinjite? Yes.

Does what this is about even matter at this point?

I guess so, or I wouldn’t have a site.

Piper is caught between the ATF, Kitaen — who hired him to run drugs for her husband — and the drug dealers. Stick with it, the last twenty minutes are all action and Piper even unleashes some wrestling moves! Yes, I can hear you asking. Does Tawny Kitaen get naked? No. But maybe if you like Camilla More, you will enjoy this. And Piper is frequently undressed for the ladies. Or the guys.

This was a LIVE Entertainment release that also played on Showtime—thanks, as always, The Schlock Pit—and it reminds me of a better time, when you could gather all of these actors and have just the barest idea of a plot and make Dead Calm with a pro wrestler and the girl who danced on a car in a Whitesnake video.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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.

Jenõ Hódi is the founder and managing director of the Budapest Film Academy. He studied in America at Columbia University, where he was taught by Milos Forman, Brian De Palma, Frank Daniel, John Avildsen and Dusan Makavejev. This all leads us to the films he made in the U.S., and like any director breaking into films in the 1990s, he made movies that would succeed on video and cable, like Guns & Lipstick and the vampire movie Metamorphosis. That also means that he has an erotic thriller on his resume. Or a slasher. It’s in-between, so maybe, just maybe, it’s a Giallo.

John Doe (Joe Paradise) is a maintenance man at Gotham College who deals with the abuse he’s given every day by killing rats in experiments and lining their bodies up in a fridge. He has a plan to use laced ice cream to murder women, which will get him a million dollars. What will he do with all that money? I don’t think he knows or cares.

One of his victims was almost Denise (Darnell Martin, who would go on to direct I Like It Like That, thanks Outlaw Vern!), who survives and ends up having an undercover cop named Dino Andretti (Jeffrey R. Iorio) protect her and her roommate Pamela (Monica Breckenridge). The police think John Doe is going to come back after Denise, and they’re right, as he comes after her just as Pamela finally shoots her shot and tries to go from roommate to partner. That’s a horrible time for a slasher killer to show up, but here we are.

But how he does it pushes this movie into another place. As Pamela is swimming, John pelts her with basketballs in the dark before getting close and killing her. Then, he Weekend at Bernie’s her body and then uses a chain to try and choke the life out of her. That’s commitment. How does she fight him? She uses a pitching machine to blast him right in the nuts.

Alright, I love this movie.

Not only does this have a heavy metal song over the credits, but the killer quotes Hall and Oates. The director made this at Columbia with other students before he graduated, yet it’s better than so many other slashers despite coming out in late 1988. A heroine who stops eating ice cream—which saves her life—so she can do a shower scene? I’m shocked that this isn’t winking at us more.

Dino may be the worst slasher cop ever, as he stays in the apartment with the girls, trying to make it with both of them, goes through Denise’s underwear, exposes himself to Pamela, and turns on gigantic sunglasses — the kind you buy on vacation as a joke and never wear — when told to settle down. He then ends up in a relationship with the final girl because you can’t get thrown off the force for this kind of behavior in a 1988 direct-to-video slasher movie.

Defund the slasher police!

How has this never been released by Vinegar Syndrome? It’s totally their kind of movie!

Andrew Stevens seemingly took on the male lead in almost every erotic thriller of the 1990s. Reuniting with his Night Eyes 2 and 3 co-star Shannon Tweed, he plays Nick Richardson, the mystery man who exists only in the dreams of his character, Moira Davis. She’s been abused by her husband, Dr. Daniel Davis (Joe Cortese), for so long that she’s gone into this fantasy world, dreaming of Nick and the gorgeous house that he’s built.

What happens when she finds that house? Well, she does. Nick lives there. So what is fantasy, and what is real?

Directed by Stevens from a script by Karen Kelly (formerly one of the Hardbodies; she also wrote Body Chemistry 4: Full Exposure, Dead of Night, Poison Ivy: The New Seduction and another Stevens and Tweed movie, Scorned), this film gets called out in We Kill for Love because of how it takes the erotic thriller script, eschews much of the noir and becomes almost a fantasy film yes, I know, beyond the sex fantasy.

SubTorretto on Letterboxd had a line about this that I love: “Shannon Tweed has gorgeously lit sex dreams that devolve into her running down a passage of flowing curtains, a mix of horror, mystery and stunning beauty; it’s like she’s in an 80s Italian slasher.” Maybe that’s why I loved this so much, as it has the rich blackness of VHS-era Italian movies that I go crazy for. This event has the candelabras of the Italian gothic! Those dream sequences have the kind of fog that Fulci loved, minus the eye violence he adored so much more.

Other than the Gregory Dark films, this film stands at the pinnacle of the erotic thriller genre. It may not adhere to the genre’s rules, but its unique take and bold deviations make it significant.

Based on Pretty Maids All in a Row by Francis Pollini, this combination of sexploitation, comedy and murder mystery — let’s just call it Giallo — was directed by Roger Vadim from a screenplay by producer Gene Roddenberry.

It was sold on the idea that eight new actresses were making their debut- all young and quite fetching. They were Brenda Sykes (Mandingo, Black Gunn), Joy Bang (Night of the Cobra Woman, Messiah of Evil), Gretchen Burrell (wife of Gram Parsons), Joanna Cameron (Isis), Aimée Eccles (Lovelines), June Fairchild (a member of the Gazzarri Dancers on the syndicated variety show Hollywood A Go-Go; she invented “The Statue Dance” with dancer Mimi Machu; she’s also in Up In Smoke, sniffing Ajam powder), Margaret Markov (Run, Angel, Run; The Hot Box) and Diane Sherry (Lana Lang in Superman).

Further sex sells came from a feature in the April 1970 issue of Playboy, which featured an interview with the director and a nine-page pictorial of stars Angie Dickinson, Burrell, Eccles, Markov and Playboy bunny Joyce Williams, who was also in the film (and Soylent Green). Maybe they should have told the teachers at University High School in West Los Angeles, who would later complain about how dirty — and violent, but this is America, so mostly dirty — the movie was.

Oceanfront High School has seen many of its most beautiful teens killed by a serial killer. Could it be Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson), who is surrounded by sexually available women all day and is being driven mad by them? Or football coach and guidance counselor Michael “Tiger” McDrew (Rock Hudson), who has probably slept with all of the school’s best-looking ladies by now? That’s what Detective Sam Surcher (Telly Savales) wants to know.

Tiger and Ponce strike up a friendship, as Tiger wants to get Ponce laid. After all, the kid claims that he has a constant erection. He conspires to set the student up with the new teacher, Betty Smith (Angie Dickinson). As this goes down — literally — more women are being killed every day. I mean, Ponce finds a dead body in the men’s room when all he wants to do is jerk off!

Vadim is well-known for his relationships with Brigitte Bardot and Jane Fonda and his movies. Perhaps having this many good-looking women on set at the same time—Roddenberry was no saint either, having affairs with Nichelle Nichols and Majel Barrett during Star Trek and supposedly harassing several others—just short-circuited his brain.

But hey, despite how all over the place this is, it has Keenan Wynn as a lawman, Roddy McDowall as the principal and Barbara Leigh as Tiger’s wife. Hudson plays his role well, a man who has won so many times that he starts to think that he can kill and escape the law. Maybe he does. James Doohan even shows up, getting a role from his old boss as one of Savales’ assistant detectives.

Quentin Tarantino included this in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll of the best movies of all time. I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s the type of movie that isn’t good, but is definitely entertaining. 

This isn’t a sequel to the Madonna movie Body of Evidence, but instead more of a remake than a sequel to the superior 1993 Gregory Dark-directed movie Body of Influence. This is a one-and-done for director, writer and music supervisor Brian K. Smith, who tells the tale of psychotherapist Dr. Thomas Benson (Daniel D. Anderson) and his patient Leza Watkins (Jodie Fischer). In the past, Dr. Thomas had fallen in love with one of his patients, only to watch helplessly as she killed her husband. You see, he’s socially awkward and maybe didn’t want to make the faux pas that would occur when you know you stop a maniac from raping and murdering someone you love while you’re in their house.

Leza has psycho-sexual nightmares and does the Vertigo trick on the not-so-good doctor, as she looks just like his dead patient. He refuses to treat her, and then she convinces him through her sexual skills, which get pretty wild, something that perhaps this social nebbish is not ready for, according to his brother Rick (Jonathan Goldstein), who is a private dick. Lexa’s already married — and yes, a patient, so ethics, etc. — but she keeps convincing our therapeutic lead that she needs his out-of-matrimony skills, as her husband is rich, old and hates sex.

Really, skip this and just watch the original. It has Shannon Whirry in it, and Gregory Dark has no idea how to make a bad erotic thriller. This one would be an example of a poor effort.

In 1981, I would have been nine, and maybe I wasn’t yet ready to recognize when the opposite sex was attractive to me. That said, my grandfather had one poster in his room, one he’d framed and placed next. to his bed. It was the famous Heather Thomas photo of her getting out of a bathtub. It was signed — well, not really, but it had her signature — love and laughs, Heather Thomas. The further I get away from my childhood, I realize that my grandfather maybe didn’t have much of either, growing up poor in the depression, leaving before he was eighteen for a war and spending forty-plus years in a blast furnace. So if he wanted a poster of Heather Thomas, why not? He could have done worse.

Thomas was best known for the TV show The Fall Guy, as well as showing up in movies like Zapped!, Cyclone and Kiss of the Cobra before retiring in the 1990s, worried about stalkers. If this movie is any indication, she was probably better served being on posters than being a leading lady. That said, I don’t want to be mean. My grandfather’s ghost would sit me down for a talk if I were too rude to Ms. Thomas.

In this erotic thriller, she’s Ellen Carlyle, a news anchor sick of stalkers, as art imitates life. She’s supposedly middle-aged, which in 1993 was thirty-five years old. Despite her fears — and a Giallo killer wiping out exotic dancers — she still opens her remote country cabin and thighs to Ben Scanlon (Jan-Michael Vincent), who claims to be a park ranger or law officer or you know, who can tell. He’s Jan-Michael Vincent in an erotic thriller, and therefore, we should not trust him.

Meanwhile, her work husband Joey (Nicholas Celozzi) keeps trying to save her, as if he’ll ever escape being a dick in glass and get to be in her life more than a special friend.

Directed by John Stewart (Action U.S.A., Click: The Calendar Girl Killer) and written by David Reskin (Stargames, Dark Future), this promises you what you couldn’t get on TV — Heather Thomas nudity — without really delivering. What emerges is the kind of movie that gets YouTube comments from perverts excited that it has the content they’re looking for. One mentions that she gets an OTS carry in this, which I had no idea of. Over the Shoulder. As always, if there is something in this world that exists, someone wants to jerk off to it. I assume that many rented this movie just for Thomas, not the promise of OTS.

Imagine if that commentator was my grandfather? That would have buttoned this story up.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Somehow, I got this far into a month of erotic thrillers without doing a Gregory Dark movie. Well, as it is, I’m close to seeing all of his non-adult films. And yes, you know, I’ve seen all of the Dark Brothers movies and wish someone was willing to unleash a 4K of one of them. Today is not about dreams, however. It’s all about Animal Instincts.

Joanna (Shannon Whirry; Entertainment Weekly referred to Whirry and Dark as “the Dietrich and Von Sternberg of the soft-core set”) is in a sexless marriage with police officer David Cole (Maxwell Caulfield). They love each other, but he can’t get it up, and seeing as how he’s married to Shannon Whirry, he really should see a doctor. She ends up sleeping with the guy who comes to fix their cable. He watches — trivia note, Paul Vatelli’s I Like to Watch was the first adult movie I ever saw — she gets it on. Soon, he’s as hard as Chinese algebra, ready to doodle-bop, crush guts, play Chesterfield rugby and bend her over a barrel and show her all fifty states.

The problem is that they start inviting all sorts of men—and women—Delia Sheppard needs something to do, right—over and the mob, in the form of William (David Carradine), finds out and tries to use them to get some scandal leverage on politician Fletcher Ross (Jan-Michael Vincent). I love it when a suburban romance turns into sleaze and this movie knows exactly the kind of movie it should be. Plus, as gorgeous as Whirry is, she also knows how to act, as does most of the cast, which puts this above the normal saxophone sex scene slapdash sinema.

Did I cast this movie? It has Mitch Gaylord from American Rickshaw and John Saxon in it. Yes, if you want to connect actors, you can use Gregory Dark to link John Saxon to Brittany Spears, Madison Stone, Jamie Gillis and WWE superstar—and now right-wing mayor—Kane.

Dark doesn’t stray much from his adult movies, as Kelly Royce appears. The same year, he’d make Mirror Images, Secret Games, Night Rhythms and just one XXX movie, The Creasemaster. Did I even have to look up that it starred Tiffany Mynx on IMDB? No, of course I didn’t. And man, Erika Nann is in Animal Instincts, and she makes any movie better, such as her role as the queen in Legion of Iron.

Written by Georges des Esseintes and Jon Robert Samsel, who worked with Dark several times, this was shot by Wally Pfister, who would go on to work with Christopher Nolan on Memento and Inception, as well as shoot the movies I’m more into: Amityville: A New Generation and The Unborn.

I want to call out Radio Times for talking down on this, saying, “Director Gregory Hippolyte, who became one of the genre’s leading directors, presents the many couplings with some panache, but he can’t hide the fact that this is really just Emmanuelle for the 1990s.” Come on. This has nothing to do with the plot of this movie,e and this review came directly from someone who didn’t know a single thing about erotic thrillers and just needed one to relate it to. Do your research. Your one-handed research.