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.

Directed by Jag Mundhra and written by Tom Citrano and Andrew Stevens, Night Eyes was inspired by Stevens meeting a woman whose house was shadowed by her soon-to-be ex, a rock star. Rod Stewart is the rumored cucked man, so the woman could be Alana Hamilton Stewart, Kelly Emberg or Britt Ekland; way to go, Andrew Stevens. As Stevens walked around the house, he ran into a security guard who handed him his card, which read “Night Eyes Security.” This inspired the actor to make this groundbreaking — well, money-making, at least — effort.

Will Griffith (Stevens) has been hired by British musician Brian Walker (Warwick Sims), who is in the middle of a divorce from his wife, Nikki (Tanya Roberts). According to her angry ex, he’s to use his cameras to record the house and catch her in the act with the lovers she must have. The more time Will spends around her — and watching her — he starts to fall for her and become protective. You know the film noir story, but this is 1990, and in the world of VHS and cable erotic thrillers, this was one of the first to become big business.

There is only one other critic review on IMDB, and of course, it’s from The Schlock Pit. They understand its value, at least to the canon of the genre, saying, “Plodding and clumsy, Night Eyes is more interesting for its historical value than it is to actually experience. Essentially ground zero for the straight-to-video erotic thriller…”

Like all the best noir, this proves that women are wise, men are stupid and that any red-blooded male can be enticed by Tanya Roberts and really, who can say anything bad about that? People murder for all kinds of reasons. At least this one seems pleasurable.

Yes, this is a clunker, but the three sequels? That’s the kind of erotic thriller I’m here for.

Imagine if Roger Corman produced a Giallo. Well, didn’t he do this a whole bunch of times with all of those erotic thrillers? An in-name-only sequel directed by Catherine Cyran (writer of Slumber Party Massacre III), this has Phillip (Barry Bostwick) marrying a series of age-appropriate women like Jean (Lesley-Anne Down) and bringing his young daughter Casey (Teresa Hill) to live with them. But like a plot out of a Caroll Baker/Umberto Lenzi movie, Phillip and Casey are truly lovers and kill off the wheelchair-bound rich woman before they have to deal with her lawyer, Howard (Michael Gross). But then it turns out that Jean may not be as dead as she seems.

This movie almost doesn’t want the erotic part of its genre. At one point, after getting high at a goth club, Casey brings home another club girl named Lisa (Betsy Lynn George) for a three-way with her much older lover. Instead of showing that, it’s all in dialogue, and we cut to the following day. As a result, this feels more like a TV movie than an actual erotic film. That said, Teresa Hill is gorgeous, but I’m also someone who grew up in the pre-Suicide Girls days of nascent goth girls who had no set way of wearing their makeup and couldn’t easily find Manic Panic and Urban Decay at Target.

The story is better than the first, however. I’m always a fan of criminals falling for someone who is even more dangerous than them, and this gets that right, with supernatural ghostlighting (I’m copyrighting that phrase) and Alex Keaton’s dad playing lover against lover.

Also known as Behind Closed Doors, this was made in the same house as Carnosaur 2. As always, I have to thank The Schlock Pit for that knowledge.

You can watch this on YouTube.

There are all kinds of sex symbols, but for boys who grew up in the 80s and 90s, erotic thrillers gave us a secret world of actresses who boiled our barely contained passions. Shannon Tweed. Shannon Wirry. Monique Parent. Yes, I realize the genre contains actresses like Glenn Close, Meg Ryan and Linda Fiorentino, but we’re not talking about the big-budget films. We’re talking about Cinemax After Dark, USA Up All Night, and the boxes in the video store that said “must be 18 to rent,” yet weren’t in the back room.

When I think of Sally Kirkland, I often associate her with high-end cinema, given her Golden Globe Award for Best Actress in a Motion Picture – Drama and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Female Lead, not to mention her Academy Award nomination for Best Actress for Anna. However, her roles in Fatal Games, Best of the Best and Two Evil Eyes remind me that she’s not confined to a single genre. So, when she graces an erotic thriller, it’s not a shock, but it does add a surprising twist to her versatile career.

The Schlock Pit, always a go-to reference, has an interview with her where she claims, “I love In the Heat of Passion. If somebody were strategizing my career, they probably wouldn’t have let me do it. But I’m very proud of that film. A lot of people would have said, “She made a lot of wrong choices,” thinking that I should have continued to do Anna (1987)-type films and wondering why I was doing this B film but I owed Roger Corman so much. I owed him a favor. Roger asked me to do In the Heat of Passion and I’d grown up with him. He taught me — I was a casting director for him and his wife Julie back in the late ’60s and ’70s, and then he had mentored me on producing. He mentored me from day one and I’m godmother to his oldest daughter, so, yeah, it was a payback… Roger paid me well and, as you know, Roger doesn’t pay. So to get paid well by Roger was really something.”

Kirkland is therapist Lee Adams, who falls for an actor named — of all things — Charlie Bronson (Nick Corri, who is also Jsu Garcia), an actor who is currently doing oil changes. While not dipping his stick into Kirkland, he’s acting on a crime show called Crimebusters. Soon, her husband Sanford (Michael Greene) is accidentally dead at his hands, and the role Charlie’s been playing, a Night Stalker-styled serial killer, is still at large. As you can start to put together, Adams may know who that masked murderer is and use him and Charlie to get what she wants.

This was released as an R-rated movie in theaters — a rarity for erotic thrillers not made with a vast bankroll — before being released on video unrated and with two very suggestive oral sex scenes. Also, if you ever wanted to see Sally Kirkland’s iced gems, good news. They’re all over this movie. But you know, show some respect. She was nearly fifty and could sexually outshine young actresses through her attitude and talent.

Also: Yes, that is Lisa Kudrow in a small role.

You can watch this on YouTube.

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…”