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…”

Directed by Shinji Aoyama, EM Embalming follows Miyaki Murakami (Reiko Takashima), an embalmer — did you guess from the title? — who assists Detective Hiroka (Yutaka Matsushige) in investigating the suicide of Yoshiko Shindo, the son of a local politician. Yoshiko has jumped to his death from a building. To aid in the investigation, Reiko begins the process of reassembling Yoshiko’s body for preservation. However, she is cautioned by a priest (Kojiro Hongo) that her work is considered evil, and that embalming bodies is a sin.

As the story unfolds, the head of the deceased boy is stolen, and suspicion falls on his girlfriend (Hitomi Miwa) as the alleged thief. But soon, Miyaki discovers that Dr. Fuji (Toshio Shiba), who operates an operating room in the back of a large truck and was also the man who embalmed her mother, is involved in harvesting corpses and selling body parts on the black market.

In Japan, embalming is not as commonplace as in the United States. Miyaki’s skills transform her into an artist, even if her craft is gruesome. The film does not shy away from blood and gore, rapidly shifting between detective work and horror, which aligns it with the Giallo genre. And yes, the pun is intentional—there’s abundant blood.

The film’s narrative is scattered; it moves slowly, intertwining themes of incest and grief within its complex storyline. Yet unlike so many movies made in the J-horror boom, it doesn’t want to be the next anything. It wants to be itself, a strange, headless, desiccated mess of a film.

Director Paolo Fazzini also made Hanging Shadows: Perspectives on Italian Horror Cinema, so he understands Giallo. He is telling us about Davide (Gianluca Testa), a blue-collar worker who has lost his job, so he kidnaps “the girl” (Eleonora Bolla), an exotic dancer who is the daughter of a rich factory owner, taking her away from the city to a small home near Sicily. He ties her up and takes care of her, all while looking for work and finally spiraling into becoming a murderer.

His mind is caught between nightmares and waking life, seeing visions of people who want to bite into his flesh in the forest or a woman with no mouth. The film invites us to “Witness the birth of a new serial killer,” but if you’re coming to this for a slasher, it moves slowly, and the time between the violent and caring acts takes time.

It looks wonderful—cinematographer Mirco Sgarzi has talent—and also has one of my favorite things: a claim that it was inspired by true events. Yet whenever I wanted it to expand into more than just sitting, watching, and waiting, it felt like it never wanted to go there. Sure, Giallo inspires it, but it never embraces anything other than the color that fills each moment.