Joseph Prince (Colin Firth) somehow scores the beyond-beautiful Cynthia (Lisa Zane), a bad girl who might seem out of the league of a park ranger/artist. On the night of their honeymoon, she disappears. He spends days, months, and years looking for her while being laughed at by his best friend Elijah (Billy Zane, and yes, he and Lisa are sisters; consider then the Ivan and Rada Rassimov of this kind of sort of Giallo) makes fun of him.

This leads him to the big city, where he tries to locate her by pictures of her tattoo—nearly getting murdered by Danny Trejo—and meets another of her past loves, Jenny Purge (Lisa Blount), a woman with whom she made BDSM art films. Oh, Joseph, you barely knew this woman and kept getting shocked that she ran drugs and had a girlfriend. And is that the Log Lady as a nun? Sure is.

There’s also a scene where Joseph goes to see Parasite, The Head Hunter and The Evil Below in the theater, which I want from my erotic thrillers.

Directed by Andre R. Guttfreund (who won an Oscar for short In the Region of Ice and primarily worked in TV, directing episodes of Knots Landing) and written by Michael Ferris and John D. Brancato, who would later write The Net and Catwoman, this is the dumbest of the dumb movies, and for that, I loved it. It wants to be neo-noir or Giallo or something, yet it has a scene where Mr. Darcy and Machete discuss what a succubus is. Where else will you get that movie drug?

You can watch this on YouTube.

In Italy, when erotic thrillers became big sellers on cable and video, old masters came back, like Martino and Mattei, to make Giallo movies that were softcore or adult thrillers or whatever title people wanted to sell them as. And in America, I wondered, why didn’t the names of the past come back? Brad Sykes recommended this one to me. As the credits started, Lee Frost’s name came up, and I instantly jumped from my chair and fell to the ground like an old person who needed a Life Alert. Rolling around and yelling as I struggled to get up from the weight of my office chair, I started laughing like a lunatic.

Fuck yes, Lee Frost!

Like the Italian masters — lunatics — I worship, Lee Frost used a ton of names, like David Kayne, R.L. Frost, F.C. Perl, Elov Peterson, Les Emerson, Carl Borch, Leoni Valenti, no, and so many more. He started with sexploitation like Surftide 77 and the baffling in a good way The House on Bare Mountain before going deep into roughies like The Defilers, The Pick-Up and The Animal, as well as American mondos like Mondo Bizarro, Mondo Freudo and The Forbidden.

Just like Italian exploitation fiends who jumped from trend to trend depending on what was hot, Frost made Westerns (Hot Spur, The Scavengers), biker films (Chrome and Hot Leather), occult movies (Witchcraft ’70), horror (The Thing with Two Heads), hicksploitation (Dixie Dynamite), Naziploitation (Love Camp 7), blacksploitation (The Black Gestapo) and porn. Yeah, you knew that was coming. But Frost made A Climax of Blue Power, the kind of adult movie that looked at porno chic and said, “What if we made something that upsets everyone that sees it?”

Somewhere in here, Frost had the time to write Race With the Devil.

How can we make this better for me? What if it were an Emanuelle — well, Emanuelle Griffith — movie? And what if Shannon Whirry played the role?

She’s a supermodel, yes, just like so many of the many Emanuelles that we have come to love. She’s also a female empowerment person who gives TED talks to other women about how men have to give up their control of the world, saying, “Good morning, ladies, and welcome to a man’s world!”

This enrages Richard Tate (Michael Christian, oh wow, Eddie from Poor Pretty Eddie), who kidnaps her and forces her to be debased. Detective Sam Weston (Bo Svenson) is looking for her, as is Sergeant Jim Lytel (Tony Burton, Apollo Creed’s trainer). Along the way, Rip Taylor plays a travel agent, Francine York is the leader of the feminist club that has Emanuelle speak, Whirry has to cover herself in butter to get through a dog door naked and then decides to drink water out of a toilet. It’s like Lee Frost hadn’t made a movie in more than a decade, because that’s true, and he decided to get it all out of his system because this was the last movie he’d make.

Yes, a captive Whirry, forced to eat fancy meal while watching a stalker on a monitor, long monologues from both leads and the kind of quality that lands a movie on a video store shelf with masking tape and a magic marker warning you that you have to be 18. And even if you are, you should watch this in the shower to save time because of how many times you’ll need a shower.

What would make it the absolute number one and the best? What if Lee Frost has a cameo? There’s also a song called “Feminazi March,” written by Frost, which combines sexploitation and Nazis, two things he definitely got boners over.

I don’t know who this movie is for other than me, but for all my complaints that erotic thrillers aren’t out on DVD, MVD has you covered. You can get this from them, along with the Julie Strain movie Midnight Confessions.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph Perry writes for the film websites Gruesome Magazine, The Scariest Things, Horror Fuel, The Good, the Bad and the Verdict and Diabolique Magazine; for the film magazines Phantom of the Movies’ VideoScope and Drive-In Asylum; and for the pop culture websites When It Was Cool and Uphill Both Ways. He is also one of the hosts of When It Was Cool’s exclusive Uphill Both Ways podcast and can occasionally be heard as a cohost on Gruesome Magazine’s Decades of Horror: The Classic Era podcast.

Director Matsuo Akinori’s Hong Kong/Japan coproduction Asia-Pol (AKA Asiapol Secret Service and Asia Secret Police Force; 1966) is a 1960s James Bond inspired movie with a difference . . . a few, actually, when compared with other Bond knock-offs from around the world. Overall, it’s an entertaining watch from the combined production efforts of the Shaw Brothers and Nikkatsu studios, which right there makes it worthy of recommendation.

Ryutaro (Jimmy Wang Yu, a major action star for the Shaw Brothers), a secret agent for the titular Japan-based organization, searches for Georgie Eaton (Jo Shishido), the ringleader behind a gold smuggling scheme who happens to have a highly selfish chip on his shoulder regarding wanting revenge on Japan. It’s possible that Ryutaro’s father may have been mixed up with the baddies, and he hopes to clear his deceased father’s name.

Interestingly, quite unlike James Bond and the heroic knock-off characters he inspired, Ryutaro is uninterested in women. This despite the fact that the beautiful Asia-Pol secretary Sachiko (Ruriko Asaoka) is making her interest in him strongly known. He also throws out a lovely young lass who was waiting for him in his room. The young woman who gets the most attention from him is Ming Hua (Fang Ying), who may be his sister and therefore is a pawn in the evil game Georgie and his underlings play.

Aside from the differences it sports, Asia-Pol shares many tropes and cliches in common with the 1960s Bond films and knock-offs. From “Ha! You’ve walked right into our trap!” lines to the main villain explaining his grandiose plans in detail before leaving the hero to escape his certain-doom predicament, it’s all here, just in case the viewer has never seen a sixties spy movie before.

There’s a certain charm to the lo-fi aspect of the inventive gadgets on display — from cigarette case phones to incendiary devices — and though the fight scenes and chase scenes also show budgetary limitations, everyone involved obviously gave their all. The prolific Akinori was no stranger to action cinema, and he keeps things interesting with solid pacing. The cast members all provide interesting performances, and Toshiro Mayazumi’s jazzy score fits the proceedings perfectly.

Aficionados of sixties secret agent adventures should find plenty to enjoy with Asia-Pol. Akinori and his cast bring a big helping of spirit to the film, making for a fun cinematic ride.

From January 31, Asia-Pol will be available on FILM MOVEMENT PLUS, which can be found on its own site at filmmovementplus.com or via Amazon Prime Video.

Also known as Fatal Instinct — the most “we’ve got that erotic thriller at home” title ever — this movie was directed by John Dirlam (a camera op on Silk Stalkings, which had to prepare him for this, as well as the cinematographer of The Vineyard and If You Don’t Stop It…You’ll Go Blind!!!) and written by George Putnam, who also wrote Unlawful Entry.

Cliff Burden is a detective looking into the death of a developer. He falls in love with the top suspect, Catherine Merrims (Laura Johnson), just as you’d expect in a film noir. Or an erotic thriller. Except all the sex happens offscreen, so…why would you have Ashlyn Gere in your cast and do that to your audience?

The plot does not matter at all. In the meantime, Madsen wanders around this big, fancy apartment building and tries to keep this rich woman away from the law while being the law. There’s no reason why someone killed the developer, and that murder does not mean anything. Yes, this is just a movie of hanging out, tough guy dialogue and lovely cinematography, which was Dirlam doing double duty.

Is there neon? Is there a saxophone soundtrack? Then, yes, this is an erotic thriller because there’s a sexy tennis scene along the way. It’s not the Skinemax you’re looking for, but hey, this is from a time when Michael Madsen was the selling point for direct-to-video detective films.

Katt Shea launched her directing career with Stripped to Kill, which is, as I always say, way better than it should be. She followed that up with several movies for Roger Corman — Dance of the Damned, Stripped to Kill 2: Live Girls and Streets, which led to this movie. Since then, she’s made The Rage: Carrie 2, Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase and the Netflix movie Rescued by Ruby. She draws on her acting past to help inform her films and can turn what should be exploitation movies into exploitation art movies. She doesn’t forget where she came from but still rises above it.

This won the Grand Jury prize of Best Film at Sundance, but it became a success on video and cable. In 88 short minutes, we meet misfit Sylvie Cooper (Sara Gilbert), watch her become friends with Ivy (Drew Barrymore) and then everything falls to pieces.

Sylvie doesn’t fit in at her rich school, paid for by her TV newsman father, Darryl (Tom Skeritt). Her mother, Georgie (Cheryl Ladd), is close to death, stuck on an oxygen machine and barely there most of the time. Ivy senses that there’s a place she can belong here, as a poor girl at the school on a scholarship. She shows her legs to Dad, fixes Mom’s oxygen and lets Sylvie think that she has someone with whom she can fit in with. Maybe that mercy killing of a dog was intense, but Ivy seems like she could be good, right?

Ivy moves in and slowly becomes a part of the entire family’s life, replacing Georgie in Darryl’s bed. The first time, she drugs Sylvie and has Daryll kneel between her young thighs. Soon, she’s wearing his wife’s clothes, and even the dog chooses her as a favorite over Sylvie.

Then she shoves Sylvie’s mom off the balcony, and no one suspects her because Georgie is mentally ill and near death. Finally, Sylvie confronts her, which ends up with a car accident, a hospital visit and her almost death, Ivy becomes her mother as she fights her way through the pain and the drugs, and they kiss…only for Ivy to shove her tongue in Sylvie’s mouth, ending the dream and bringing back the reality where this friend has murdered her mother and stolen her father.

Shea never presents Ivy as the villain. She does horrible things, but we understand her and the fact that she wants love. Everyone in this wants love. The original ending — this had four of them — saw Ivy getting away with it, and New Line — who wanted a teenage Fatal Attraction — needed a square-up reel where the villain needed to be punished. She dies, even though Shea wanted to make sequels. That said, there are sequels, but not with her characters, Alyssa Milano, Jamie Pressly and Miriam McDonald starring.

That said, Ivy only exists in this movie as the manifestation of the desire that others have. For Dad, she’s a younger version of his wife who wants to have sex and isn’t dying. For Sylvie, she’s a best friend who she can come out to. But what does Ivy want? Love. To be a mother. I think she’s been played as much as she’s playing everyone else.

The strangest thing? This movie is based on truth. Producer Melissa Goddard had a friend stay with her and her family when she was young, and that friend slept with her stepfather, Mike Medavoy, the co-founder of Orion Pictures.

I know we all get old, but when I see Drew Barrymore in ads for phone games, I get sad. For most of my teen years, she was my ideal, a strange creature who was barely understood, someone who would bring trouble into your life, like a manic pixie femme fatale. I hate seeing her selling crock pots at WalMart. You used to ruin families. Now you have a talk show.

You can download this from the Internet Archive.

Playmaker, also known as Death Date and Private Teacher, was recommended to me by Brad Sykes, who knows a thing or two about erotic thrillers, as he directed two movies in the last days of the genre, Demon’s Kiss and Loving Angelique. Producer Peter Samuelson saw two people standing on a Hollywood street corner holding a sign “looking for money for a movie.” After several rewrites, their story became this movie, which was filmed at The Eagle’s Nest in Chatsworth, CA. It was the former home of The Captain and Tenille.

Jamie Harris (Jennifer Rubin, Taryn from A Nightmare On Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors and the star of a movie that maybe only I love Bad Dreams) is a waitress/actress who wants to land a role in the film Playmaker. Her friend Eddie (John Getz) offers to set her up with the mysterious Ross Talbert (Colin Firth; more on a star of that caliber being in an erotic thriller in a moment), an acting teacher who can “bring the real you out.” His teaching is more psychologically abusive than the Meisner Technique or Lee Strasberg’s Method; several of his past students have been murdered. One night — after they’ve had shower sex, this is an erotic thriller, right? — She makes her way into the room that she demands never to be opened. It’s filled with stalker photos of her, blown up to a considerable size, and a book that gives her a grade of F for her acting. He comes in with a knife; she shoots him in self-defense.

Yet when the police come, it’s not Talbert’s body. It’s another man, Michael Condren. So, who did she kill? And has she learned how to be a great actress because of all of this? She does get the lead in Playmaker.

The Schlock Pit has covered this—I feel like every time I look up a VHS-era film, they are there, and this warms my insides—and they report that it was written by Michael Schroeder (Out of the Dark) and rewritten yet again by its director, Yuri Zeltser, who wrote Bad Dreams.

So wait — how did Colin Firth, the Best Actor Academy Award-winning actor for The King’s Speech — end up in a movie that had a “must be 18 to rent” handwritten sticker on it? Firth has repeatedly spoken of his hate for this movie, telling The Sun, “My son happened to be in Los Angeles at the time. It was a three-week job, and it paid extremely well. It’s a rather silly story about an acting coach who trains an actress by psychologically torturing her. I knew it would be complete rubbish,h and I sincerely hope no one ever sees it.”

He also told The Weekly News, “…it was a terrible film. I hope it sinks without a trace.”

He explained to The Radio Times four years after making it, “If I want to buy a house or am about to go bankrupt, and someone comes along with a hefty pay cheque for a ridiculous job, I’d do it. I’ve made a couple of pieces of crap, although when one is working, one takes it seriously. It’s embarrassing appearing in rubbish, so you con yourself it’s worthwhile even though the third eye knows full well it isn’t. But I do have a child to support.”

I think the man doth protest too much.

What are the lessons that cost $5,000 from this teacher? Ego killing. You must destroy your sense of self, give up control of your mind and body, and use the worst moments in your life to fuel your craft, even if you never enjoy it. Passion doesn’t last; being able to draw on the torture of human existence? That’s what makes an actor.

However, the bad guy dies halfway through this, and our heroine is as confused as the audience. It only gets stranger from there. Also, Jennifer Rubin dresses super boxy and looks like a 1990s Louise Brooks, aggressively chewing ice while she gets day drunk in a bar and bemoans her actress life. Yeah, I kind of fell in love with her character right there.

Playmaker is better than it has any right to be. It’s my favorite type of adult thriller, one that gets the memo about being sexy and then decides that once it tickles you, it can also get weird. Downright weird. Colin Firth somehow made several Bridget Jones movies and wasn’t embarrassed by those, yet disliked this. Go figure. Maybe I just like trash.

You can watch this on YouTube.