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.

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.