Yes, somehow, I’ve never seen Wild Things.

When Kevin Bacon, who acted in it, refers to the script as “the trashiest thing he had ever read” it’s even more amazing that I have never seen this movie.

High school guidance counselor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is accused of rape by two of his students, the popular and wealthy good girl Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards playing a teenager at 27) and poor tomboy Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell playing a teenager at 24).

He hires lawyer Kenneth Bowden (Bill Murray) to defend him from these charges. When the case is tried, the girls confess to lying as Suzie was upset that Sam didn’t bail her out on a drug charge and Kelly was upset that her teacher was having an affair with her mother (Theresa Russell). Sam gets an $8.5 million dollar settlement, but it was all another lie, as the three were working together.

Sergeant Ray Duquette (Bacon) knows something isn’t kosher. But as he follows the triad, he learns that they have an ever twisting relationship and even murderous intent toward one another. I’m not spoiling anything else — I mean, the movie is 24 years old — but for a film that seems mostly discussed for its male nudity and threesome scene, it ends up being a not half bad mystery.

I like Roger Ebert’s take on the movie: “lurid trash, with a plot so twisted they’re still explaining it during the closing titles. It’s like a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir.”

Director John McNaughton is the director and co-writer of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which was his first film, and that alone should tell you he knows what he’s doing. The script comes from Stephen Peters, who wrote the novel that The Park Is Mine is taken from.

There are so many twists in that script that Bacon said, “To determine their motivation in each scene, the cast had to gather with the director, writers, and producers to establish the sequence of events. We’d sit in rehearsals trying to piece together what was going on in the script, whom we were lying to about what, and it’d just get so complicated we’d have to stop and rest.”

The Arrow release of Wild Things has new 4K restorations of both the Original Theatrical Version and the Unrated Edition from the original camera negatives by Sony Pictures Entertainment, as well as exclusive new audio commentary by director John McNaughton and producer Steven A. Jones and another commentary by director John McNaughton, cinematographer Jeffrey Kimball, producers Steven A. Jones and Rodney Liber, editor Elena Maganini and score composer George S. Clinton. There are also interviews with McNaughton and Denise Richards, as well as a making of, outtakes, a trailer, an illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by Anne Billson and Sean Hogan, a double-sided fold-out poster, six double-sided, postcard-sized lobby card reproductions and a reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Sam Hadley. You can get it from MVD and Arrow.

You can also get a Limited Edition SteelBook housed in deluxe rigid packaging, both featuring newly commissioned artwork by Sam Gilbey from Arrow.

This feels like worlds colliding as Jess Franco not only got Michele Bauer (Beverly Hills High, Chickboxer) and Linnea Quigley (do I have to even give you any of her numerous credits?) in this movie, but he pairs them with Analía Ivars, Pamela Sheppard and his muse, Lina Romay. This made me beyond excited, even if the final product is, well, a One Shot Jess Franco movie.

Lina is Tarantula, a woman who seduces other women and traps them in her web so she can show up in her spider form, which is basically a stuffed spider toy with her head superimposed upon it. It’s gleefully one of the worst effects I’ve ever seen.

Sheriff Marga (Bauer) is the kind of cop that only wears a bikini and holster with a leather jacket and I think that perhaps my dislike for the police is misplaced. Maybe not, as she’s convinced that everyone but the real criminal is repsonsible, like Mari-Cookie (also Romay) and mother and daughter team Teri and Amy (Quigley and Amber Newman from Lust for Frankenstein and Pleasurecraft).

There’s a moment in this movie where we see how Tarantula was conceived from the POV of inside a vagina that gets spider eggs laid within it. I’ve never seen that before.

The only bad thing I can say is that somehow, Jess Franco had Linnea in a movie, didn’t get her nude and she then did a naked commentary track for the DVD. That’s really something.

Nothing succeeds like success. So when The Prophecy did well, that meant that not just one but four more movies would follow. And sure, the cast isn’t as good, but Jennifer Beals plays a nurse who gets instantly pregnant with a nephilim baby thanks to a rebel angel moonlighting as a rock star, as well as a young Brittany Murphy, Eric Roberts (again, we are fated to watch every one of his movies) and Glenn Danzig as the angel Samayel, which was something that made me rent this more than once to see a short and gruff cherubim for a few seconds.

Thomas Daggett is now Bruce Abbott from Re-Animator and is also a monk given to — cue the title — prophecy. That child of angel and human will stop the war in Heaven, so Gabriel is back to stop that child from being born. And man, Roberts plays St. Michael the Archangel, so you have no idea how happy that makes me, as the prayer of St. Michael the Archangel is filled with promises of stopping the devil in his battles against humanity.

Walken does get off a few great lines, like this one: “I sang the first hymn when the stars were born. Not that long ago, I announced to a young woman, Mary, who it was she was expecting. On the other hand, I’ve turned rivers into blood, kings into cripples, cities to salt, so I don’t think that I have to explain myself to you.”

This one ends with Gabriel as a homeless human, cast out of heaven, but when there’s lightning in the sky, you know that his story is far from over.