Now on Blu-ray: John McNaughton’s 1998 Sunshine Noir-Meets-Erotic Thriller Wild Things

WILD THINGS 

(John McNaughton, 1998, US, 114 minutes) 

Since April, I've been listening to Karina Longworth's You Must Remember This podcast series on "Erotic '80s." So far, she's covered movies like 10, American Gigolo, Body Heat, and Risky Business.  When Longworth wraps up this season, she plans to take a break before returning with "Erotic '90s." I have no idea if she'll cover John McNaughton's 1998 erotic thriller Wild Things when she returns, but I hope she does. 

Granted, the Chicago-born McNaughton didn't start out as a director of erotica. No, he made a name for himself with 1986's disquieting Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, which introduced the world to Michael Rooker's uniquely uncharismatic brand of charisma as a matter-of-fact murderer.

I recently revisited McNaughton’s debut after a gap of over 30 years. To my surprise, I found that some of the same crew members, like editor Elena Maganini and producer Steven A. Jones, also worked on Wild Things, among other McNaughton pictures. It's unexpected, because he had specifically intended to make the 1998 movie blatantly commercial. That doesn't describe the grubby, nihilistic, yet subversively funny Henry in the slightest. 

Killers would turn out to be a McNaughton specialty. If they don’t appear in every film or TV show, they appear in quite a few, like 1996's Normal Life, which took inspiration from the lives of ill-fated Chicago bank robbers Jeffrey and Jill Erickson. Wild Things has more reputable-looking characters, but when push comes to shove, several of them end up wielding deadly weapons, from wine bottles to spear guns. 

Men with guns even appear in McNaughton's more lighthearted affairs, like 1993's Mad Dog and Glory, a crime comedy I long avoided due to the off-putting title and problematic premise: mobbed-up club owner and standup Frank (Bill Murray) "gifts" cop Wayne/Mad Dog (Robert De Niro, then 50) young waitress Glory (Uma Thurman, 26) as a thank-you for saving his life. 

The movie turns out to have a lot going for it, like writing from novelist Richard Price (Clockers), a classy score from Elmer Bernstein (Sweet Smell of Success), and burnished cinematography from Robby Müller (To Live and Die in LA), but none of it makes the premise any less problematic. 

Naturally, the cop, who dreams of being a photographer, and the bartender, who once dreamed of being an actress, fall in love. First, they have sex, even though she insists she isn't a sex worker (I'll credit McNaughton for the more-awkwardly-realistic-than-usual sex scenes). Frank claims that he had only intended Glory to be the lonely Wayne's "friend" for a week. 

In the new interview included with Arrow's Wild Things Blu-ray, McNaughton recalls that he needed a hit--Normal Life had come and gone without a trace--so he started by asking himself, "What sells?" The answer: "Sex and violence." The film springs from that basic idea. Granted, he had been down that road before with his previous films, but he really ups the ante here. 

Throughout, McNaughton fucks with the audience, since Stephen Peters' script revolves around situations that aren't what they appear to be, much as in The Usual Suspects. Then, during the closing credits, he shows what actually happened. I pity anyone who left the theater, or stopped the video, without finding out how the characters pulled off their various schemes.

Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon, replacing the unavailable Robert Downey, Jr.), guidance counselor at a tony high school in South Florida, initially seems like a decent guy. Adults respect him and kids can relate to him, but it quickly becomes apparent that he's an incorrigible ladies man. 

It's not just that he had an affair with wealthy widow Sandra Van Ryan (a perfectly cast Theresa Russell), but he spends an inappropriate amount of time with her daughter, Kelly (Denise Richards, fresh from a starring role in Starship Troopers), a smiley, flirty cheerleader who offers to wash his jeep with a similarly-underdressed pal for a school project. McNaughton shoots the soapy sequence like a cross between a hair metal video--think Whitesnake's "Here I Go Again"--and a skin flick. 

Granted, Sam fends off her advances in favor of an age-appropriate socialite who frequents the Blue Bay country club, but then Kelly accuses him of rape, and the noirish plot kicks into gear. Did he do it, or is she lying? If so, is she jealous of Sandra, who still lusts for Sam, or of his current squeeze? 

McNaughton doesn't let anyone off the hook. Any character could be lying at any time. It's to the cast's credit that they play it straight. There's no winking at the audience, but there's no way the actors didn't notice the ridiculousness, because there are twists on top of twists on top of twists. 

After Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell in goth-punk mode) also accuses Sam of rape, he ends up in jail, but then she tells a different story on the witness stand. The new narrative makes Kelly look like a liar, but it's too late for Sam to get his job, home, girlfriend, and reputation back (and even if his girlfriend wanted to keep seeing him, her judgmental attorney father, played by an intimidating Robert Wagner, wouldn't let her). 

Any upstanding citizen would be bereft, except Sam is about as sympathetic as the ill-starred social climber in Theodore Dreiser's 1925 novel An American Tragedy, who drowns his pregnant, working-class girlfriend when someone prettier--and richer--comes along. In this case, Sam receives a hefty settlement for his troubles. He may be homeless, but a motel room serves as an ideal spot for a three-way with his two favorite students.

You can guess their names and whether or not this windfall came about through happenstance. And that might be the end of that, except the characters aren't as clever as they think. That includes Det. Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon), who McNaughton had introduced in the opening sequence when he speaks at a Blue Bay High senior seminar on sexual assault.

Upon learning of the $8.5 million payday, Duquette spies on Kelly and Suzie to determine if they were in on the scam, doing so in a way that suggests he's more of a sleazy voyeur than a dedicated detective. McNaughton rewards him for his efforts when he catches the ladies in a poolside clinch (if Richards has several topless scenes, Campbell's Party of Five contract included a no-nudity clause to which McNaughton adheres). 

Later in the film, Sam and Duquette end up in a hotel room. It's a surprise reveal, so I'll spare the context, but the film's notoriety rests more on this sequence than on the situational lesbianism, which appears in other McNaughton projects, like Showtime's Girls in Prison for which both Ione Sky and Anne Heche went topless (Ashley Judd did the same in Normal Life).

There's a moment when Duquette steps out of the shower and wraps a towel around his waist for a conversation with Sam. Though McNaughton hadn't planned to include a full-frontal shot, he had originally intended to imply a sexual relationship between the two men until the studio balked. 

He got his revenge in an unexpected way: when editor Elena Maganini, who had been working with him for 12 years by that point, noticed that Bacon's towel slipped in one take, that's the one she chose, telling McNaughton that he always featured naked women in his films. It was time to switch things up. 

Consequently, there are two versions of the film, the theatrical and the unrated edition. Arrow's Blu-ray includes both. Alas, Bacon, who produced the picture, was besieged by questions about his nude scene throughout the initial press tour, which must have gotten exhausting, but also proves how rare male nudity was in mainstream American cinema in the 1990s (those who think it's just as bad today probably missed Alex Garland's Men, in which Rory Kinnear spends a significant portion of the film without a stitch of clothing--and not just for a few, blink-and-you-missed-it seconds).  

Wild Things distinguishes itself from previous McNaughton films in another crucial respect, and it's why the film holds up better than I would've expected (I didn't see it upon its original release). If Sam and Suzie are outsiders by Blue Bay standards, they're still white. Duquette's partner, Gloria Perez (Daphne Rubin-Vega, just off a run on Broadway's Rent) is not. 

Gloria is the smartest person in the film, and that includes Bill Murray's strip-mall lawyer, Kenneth Bowden, who brings some low-key humor to the proceedings. She smells a rat from the start, beginning with Kelly's rape accusation, which she doesn't buy. She continues to believe something is off, but can't prove it, not least because her partner isn't being forthcoming. Even after the rape and murder cases have been solved, the verdicts don't ring true, so she investigates on her own time, concluding that every character, most of whom end up dead, was lying. 

If it wasn't clear at the outset, she's the film's true lead, in a manner of speaking, since we see most events from her perspective. We may also suspect schemes upon schemes, but we don't know exactly what's going on, which McNaughton reveals during the closing credits. For better or for worse, audience testing shaped these reveals when the studio found that viewers liked Suzie and Kenneth the best, so McNaughton filmed a new scene with the two. Though it further untangles the twisted plot, it makes Kenneth look dirty, which he had never intended. In a sign of the times, Columbia gave McNaughton $890,000 to shoot this extraneous scene.  

All told, Wild Things is a product of a different time, and though it may seem like a stretch to describe it as a personal project, I don't believe it was merely the "sex and violence" that attracted McNaughton, but the idea of lower-class people struggling--and failing--to join the upper class.

As McNaughton notes in interviews, including Arrow's Blu-ray exclusive, he grew up on Chicago's South Side. It was never a given that he would become a Hollywood director, and there's a thread running through his work of the relatively disadvantaged trying to better themselves through legitimate means before turning to crime out of desperation--and paying the price. If he has sympathy for these people, and I believe that he does, it's because he knows the system is rigged against them. 

As for Gloria, Blue Bay's hoi polloi may never fully accept her, but she has one trait that sets her apart in ways that go beyond the physical: she doesn't care. She's the best kind of detective, because she isn't driven by anger or agenda. She just wants to get at the truth, and so she does. In a world of churning immorality, she's the film's calm, moral center.

Though Wild Things concludes with one not-born-rich character literally sailing off into the sunset with their ill-gotten gains, Gloria remains with her feet on the ground, more cynical about her adopted town perhaps, but thoroughly uncorrupted by all the secrets and lies she has uncovered. 

Notably, she has even stopped straightening her hair, a suggestion that she's more fundamentally herself than before. There's no point in trying to fit in with people don't see you for who you are, so why bother? Life's too short.

Wild Things is on Blu-ray via Arrow Video and streaming through the usual pay operators. Images: Geoffrey Lapid (Matt Dillon), Bloody Disgusting (Michael Rooker), Film Affinity (Robert De Niro), Eighties Kids (Dillon and Denise Richards), Poseidon's Underworld (Dillon and Kevin Bacon), and Creepy Catalog and 10k Bullets (Daphne Rubin-Vega).  

Terence Davies’ Benediction: The Poetry, Passion, and Pacifism of Siegfried Sassoon

BENEDICTION 

(Terence Davies, 2022, UK, 136 minutes) 

Terence Davies, 76, has made only nine features in 33 years. 

His first, 1988's Distant Voices, Still Lives, drew on his working-class childhood in Liverpool. His latest, Benediction, is less explicitly autobiographical, and yet it's a portrait of an artist who fears, in his later years, that he hasn't received sufficient recognition for the fruits of his labors. That artist, poet Siegfried Sassoon, is also queer and Catholic, so it's hard not to see the parallels with Davies (though he renounced Catholicism decades ago).  

The young Sassoon (played by Jack Lowden, most recently of the excellent spy series Slow Horses) only gets to enjoy a brief moment of unalloyed happiness, at a performance of Igor Stravinsky's "Rites of Spring" in 1914, before Davies plunges him into the hell of World War I. Instead of recreating battle sequences, the director uses black-and-white archival footage, much as he did in his collage-style ode to Liverpool, 2008's Of Time and the City.

Sassoon's voiceover draws from his poems and letters. 

After losing his brother, with whom he had enjoyed that Stravinsky concert, and suffering an injury serious enough to remove him from the front, he decides he's seen enough. He writes a letter to his commanding officers stating that he won't return to fight a war that Great Britain is prolonging purely for reasons of "aggression and conquest," leading to hundreds of thousands of fatalities and debilitating injuries. He's willing to accept the consequences of his actions, no matter how dire. Instead of a court martial, however, they send him to a hospital in Scotland for soldiers suffering from "nervous disorders," a more polite term for shell shock. 

The experiences of Sassoon and his fellow patients at Craiglockhart War Hospital formed the entirety of Gillies MacKinnon's 1997 adaptation of Pat Barker's Regeneration, which I fear has been lost to the mists of time, despite fine performances from Jonny Lee Miller as a young lieutenant and Jonathan Pryce as psychiatrist Capt. Rivers (in an interesting coincidence, Pryce plays Lowden's grandfather, a retired MI-5 agent, on Slow Horses). 

In Davies' film, Sassoon finds a sympathetic ear in Capt. Rivers (a very good Ben Daniels), who admires his poetry and has no intention of transforming him--or any patient--into a martyr for the cause. When Sassoon refers to "the love that dare not speak its name," Rivers reacts with empathy. "You're not alone in that respect," he says softly. The two men would remain friends for life.  

At Craiglockhart, Sassoon also meets fellow poet Wildred Owen (Matthew Tennyson, a real-life descendent of poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson) with whom he forms a bond. When Wilfred announces that he's been cleared to return to the front, Sassoon is heartbroken. They will not see each other again. 

If Sassoon's affair with Owen appeared to be chaste, he enters into a passionate, tempestuous relationship with composer and Lodger star Ivor Novello (a delightfully bitchy Jeremy Irvine). His brand of popular music may seem gouache to Sassoon's refined tastes--much like Terence Davies, he prefers classical--but the heart wants what the heart wants. Sassoon's wayward heart also wants Stephen Tennant (Calam Lynch), who will prove equally challenging.  

Sassoon's artistic companions include Robbie Ross (Simon Russell Beale from The Deep Blue Sea) and poet Edith Sitwell (Lia Williams). Though Davies doesn't mention it, Sitwell fell in love with him. She won't be the only woman to succumb to his charms. When it comes time for him to start living like a heterosexual man, as gay men of his class tended to do, he leaves his former life behind, though the ghosts of old lovers will haunt his days. 

Instead of a strictly chronological telling, Davies alternates between the young Sassoon and the older man of the 1960s (a pinched Peter Capaldi, miles away from his comedic performances). In these shorter sequences, which occur mainly towards the end, the light appears to have gone out of his eyes.

As the young Sassoon, Lowden is terrific. In fact, I haven't seen him give a bad performance yet. He's particularly persuasive as a barrister defending a restauranteur in Mangrove, part of Steve McQueen's very fine 2020 Small Axe series. All told, he's chosen his parts wisely and well, a pattern that recalls Tom Hiddleston, who starred in Davies's 2011 Terence Rattigan adaptation, The Deep Blue Sea, which also involved a troubled ex-soldier. 

Unusually, Benediction is the rare film about a writer that never actually shows him writing. 

Davies is more interested in Sassoon's relationships and how they shaped him. And in the Great War, the source of a devastating trauma from which he would never fully recover. Davies almost, but not quite, suggests that it might have been preferable for Sassoon to have died in battle, like the ever-young Wildred Owen, than to age into a haunted, embittered old man.

I couldn't say whether Terence Davies is haunted or embittered, but I've always assumed that the long gaps between his films indicates a difficulty in getting them made. I sincerely hope Benediction isn't his final film, but if it is, he'll be going out with as much style and grace as he came in.  

Images from Flickering Myth (Jack Lowden), Slant (Liverpool in Of Time and the City), Distractify (Gary Oldman and Lowden in Slow Horses), DP Nicola Daley (Lowden and Matthew Tennyson and Simon Russell Beale and Lia Williams), and HITC (Lowden as Ian Macdonald in Mangrove).  

Agatha Christie on Screen in the 1980s: Guy Hamilton's Glittering Evil Under the Sun

EVIL UNDER THE SUN 

(Guy Hamilton, UK, rated PG, 117 minutes) 

By relocating Agatha Christie's 1941 novel Evil Under the Sun from the South of England to an Adriatic Sea island, director Guy Hamilton makes the title more literal than ever: there's plenty of sun and an abundance of evil. 

The four-time James Bond filmmaker's 1982 feature followed three previous Christie adaptations, including 1978's Death on the Nile, featuring some of the same actors, that sparked an Agatha Christie-on-screen resurgence. 

Peter Ustinov, who would assume the role six times, plays the sleuth as an avuncular sort who stands in opposition to David Suchet's reserved take on the long-running ITV/PBS series and the Oscar-nominated Albert Finney's stylized version in Sidney Lumet's 1974 Murder on the Orient Express. 

Hired by industrialist Sir Horace Blatt (This Sporting Life's Colin Blakely) in 1937 to find a missing diamond, Poirot is enjoying a working holiday at actress-turned-hotelier Daphne Castle's seaside resort when showgirl-turned-actress Arlena Maxwell (a slinky Diana Rigg) turns up dead. With coaxing from Daphne (Maggie Smith, reuniting with Ustinov after Death on the Nile), Poirot springs into action to figure out which of the glittering guests did the deed. After all, each had motive. 

Before covering the aftermath, Hamilton, who took on Christie's The Mirror Crack'd in 1980, first establishes the problematic perimeters of Arlena's life. Preening writer Rex (Roddy McDowall) has been toiling away on her biography when she declares that she won't sign the release agreement. 

Daphne, a former king's mistress with whom she trades bon mots, isn't especially fond of her, and Arlena's put-upon husband, Kenneth (Denis Quilley, who previously appeared in Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express), feels neglected as she spends all of her time with Patrick (Excalibur's Nicholas Clay), a Latin instructor who parades around in revealing swim trunks. 

Since Arlena and Patrick are so flagrant with their affections, everyone knows about the affair, including Patrick's self-pitying wife, Christine (Jane Birkin, back for more after Death on the Nile), who wears hula hoop-sized hats and ankle-length caftans to shield her skin from the sun, and Arlena's mopey stepdaughter, Linda (Emily Hone), who snaps at everyone.

Other guests include producers Odell and Myra Gardener (James Mason and Sylvia Miles), who aim to cast Arlena in their new play, and Sir Blatt, who arrives later. Beyond the central mystery, a convoluted affair both entertaining and preposterous, the film doubles as a tourist board tribute to Hamilton's Majorca hometown with steep cliffs rising out of cerulean waters. 

Anthony Powell's go-for-broke costume design also rivals anything on Dallas or Dynasty as the ladies swan about in jewels, sequins, exotic animal prints, and linebacker-wide shoulder pads. Even the filigreed and curlicued desserts and hors d'oeuvres look like something from out of Dr. Suess's most extravagant imaginings.

Against all expectations, though, Hamilton's diversion didn't live up to box office expectations, but it's a fun romp enlivened by game performances, music by Cole Porter, and a quotable screenplay from Sleuth's Anthony Shaffer with an uncredited assist from Crimes of Passion's Barry Sandler.

With Agatha Christie back in vogue by way of Kenneth Branagh's recent adaptations, the time is ripe for rediscovery, not least because Rian Johnson has cited it as an influence on his hit 2019 whodunit Knives Out for which he has been working on the first of several planned sequels. 

Blu-ray extras include a vintage featurette, trailers for co-producers John Brabourne and Richard Goodwin's other Christie adaptations, and chatty commentary from Howard S. Berger, Steve Mitchell, and Nathaniel Thompson. 

Evil Under the Sun is more a product of the expansive time it was made than the more austere time it was written, and that's a big part of its appeal: the 1980s in full, indulgent flower.  

Evil Under the Sun (Special Edition) is available on Blu-ray and streaming via Kino Lorber. Images from Victoria Dowd (Diana Rigg), Jared Mobarak (Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot), MUBI (Peter Ustinov, Nicholas Clay, and Maggie Smith), and Pinterest (Jane Birkin and Nicholas Clay).  

CRIMES OF THE FUTURE

(David Cronenberg, 2022, Canada-France-UK-Greece, 107 minutes) 

Kirby Dick's 1997 documentary SICK: The Life & Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist doesn't just depict the life and career of performance artist Bob Flanagan (1952-1996), but of his personal and professional partnership with photographer and BDSM practitioner Sheree Rose. It would have been fascinating with Bob alone, but it's more moving with Sheree in the mix. 

Bob had cystic fibrosis, and he and Sheree knew that his time on Earth was limited. Their work involved pain, which Sheree inflicted. It was an expression of love. It was also a way to generate publicity and income. 

The same year Bob passed away at the age of 43, David Cronenberg completed Crash, his instantly-notorious 1996 adaptation of J.G. Ballard's 1973 novel (Fine Line Features delayed the film for a year due to Ted Turner's disgust). As with Dick's documentary, the film would have been fascinating with James Spader's movie producer James alone, but it's more moving with Deborah Kara Unger's Catherine, James's wife, in the mix. 

James enters the "car crash set," as the Normal once put it, after a vehicular collision that results in a gnarly leg brace that longtime Cronenberg cinematographer Peter Suschitzky (Naked Lunch) films like a fetish object (Canadian DP Douglas Koch picks up his mantle in the new film with elegant ease). 

Soon, James and Catherine enter an underground society of car tattoos and crash-related performance art. The pain, the rejection of societal norms, the proximity to death--all of these things reinvigorate their stagnant sex life. 

Crimes of the Future isn't a remake of Crash or of Cronenberg's identically-titled, if visually and thematically dissimilar 1970 Crimes of the Future, and I have no idea if Cronenberg is familiar with Bob Flanagan and/or SICK, but it's at its best when it focuses on the Bob-and-Sheree/James-and-Catherine-like relationship between future-world performance artists Saul Tenser (Viggo Mortensen, in his fourth go-round with the filmmaker) and Caprice (Léa Seydoux, in her first). Saul suffers for his art; Caprice inflicts the suffering. With her assistance, he grows new organs, which she removes surgically at public events. And then they start the process all over again. 

From the start, Saul doesn't appear well. He sounds congested, rarely raises his voice above a whisper, and shrouds his body, like a Star Wars Sith, whenever he leaves their shadowy, minimalist lair (63-year-old Mortensen, 27 years Seydoux's senior, has never looked older). It's an illness he appears to have brought on himself through the weird, unappetizing food on which he subsists--a Cronenberg specialty--and the time he spends in the skeletal-womb-shaped Sark machine that produces new organ growth. 

Saul doesn't seem to care that his vocation is making him ill. The tension in the narrative comes more from outside the home, specifically from two bureaucrats, Timlin (Kristin Stewart, the second Twilight lead to join Team Cronenberg) and Wippet (writer/director Don McKellar, who appeared in Cronenberg's 1999 eXistenZ), from the National Organ Registry, a semi-legitimate organization, and from a genetically-evolved father and resistance leader, Lang (Felicity's Scott Speedman), who has a particularly odd and disturbing request regarding Saul and Caprice's public performances. 

How Saul and Caprice deal with these encounters will affect their relationship, because everybody seems to want a piece of their act--if not a piece of them. The furtive, squirrely Timlin, for instance, doesn't just have a professional interest in Saul, she finds his scientifically-modified body sexually stimulating, too. (Caprice describes the groupie-like character as "creepy"). The way Saul and Caprice react to these strange and possibly deranged individuals adds a low-key thriller aspect to the proceedings. 

Love stories lie at the heart of many Cronenberg films, even if he isn't normally described as a romantic. These aren't necessarily healthy relationships, to say the least, but that doesn't mean he isn't interested in the ways people fall for each other--and try to keep the passion alive. 

Now 79, he was married to editor, cinematographer, and filmmaker Carolyn (Ziefman) Cronenberg, whom he met in 1979 when she served as a production assistant on Rabid, until her death in 2017. Like Sheree, like Caprice, she wasn’t just a life partner, but a professional one, as well.

I'm not suggesting that their relationship inspired Crimes of the Future; I'm suggesting that their relationship inspired much of his filmography. Not to give too much away, but Caprice doesn't die at the end of the film. She's young and presumably healthy. She enjoys looking after Saul. He's like a son, a father, a husband, a pet, a project--he satisfies her every need.

Caprice is also, with Saul's cooperation, making him sick. Cronenberg doesn't suggest that his death is imminent, but nor does he suggest that he'll ever stop producing anatomical art. It's what he does, it's who he is. Aside from his partner, he doesn't appear to have--or want--anything else. 

Crimes of the Future proves more open-ended than previous relationship-centered Cronenberg films, like the underappreciated M. Butterfly (1993) or his terrifying and heartbreaking adaptation of George Langelaan's 1957 short story The Fly (1986), making it simultaneously less immediately satisfying and yet more thought-provoking. The film ends, intentionally, with certain story strands and character arcs unresolved. 

Granted, the film also includes two murders, and since the medical advancements of the future don't include reanimation, the victims are gone for good. Saul and Caprice aren't responsible. The two performance artists aren't killers—they're lovers. Even if that love could prove deadly in the end.

Crimes of the Future opens in Seattle on Friday, June 3, 2022. Images from CineVue (Seydoux and Mortensen), White Hot Magazine (Michel Delsol, Sheree Rose, and Bob Flanagan, Wedding Vows with ’S’ Cutting, 1994), The Lost Highway Hotel (Unger and Spader), Variety (Stewart and Mortensen), The Hollywood Reporter (Cronenberg and Cronenberg), and The Internet Movie Database (Geena Davis and Jeff Goldblum).