Okay, sometimes I get a hankering to see male full frontal nudity, and my social life being what it is, I gotta go to the movies. And while I would have loved to see Matt Dillon nekkid, I had to settle for Kevin's Bacon, which ain't all that bad. That's right, I saw Wild Things, which is sort of a Zalman King movie except with plot (sort of) and without Billy Zane.
This is a really, really dumb movie that starts out as soft-core porn and ends up as... a really, really dumb movie. Like, the screenwriter figured that by having everyone screw everyone else (literally and figuratively), he'd have all his bases covered. All the double-crosses make no sense since we have little or no backstory, and the plot twists don't really shock or surprise us since we don't care about any of the characters. And many of the plot points seem to exist primarily to give Neve Campbell and Denise Richards an excuse to make out (note to the men: Campbell evidently had a no-nudity clause in her contract. Richards did not).
This is so clearly a male-fantasy movie (see, that's why it had to be Kevin Bacon naked, cause I bet they figured they should throw in a naked man for the ladies in the audience, and Matt Dillon naked probably aroused their latent homosexual impulses, which probably scared them shitless), that I don't even want to take it seriously enough to go into a feminist rant about how they treat the subject of rape. It's just all so ludicrous and cheesy that you feel like washing your hands after watching it. If it had been shorter, I could recommend it as either a trashy "so bad it's good" movie or as a chance to see all manner of sexual combinations (everything but man-to-man, which I was dying to see since it would have been Matt Dillon and Kevin Bacon, but they wussed out). As it is, it just went on too long and got too boring and stupid, so I can only recommend it as something to rent when Lake Consequence and all the Red Shoe Diaries are checked out.
By the way (going from the ridiculous to the sublime), probably none of you will be interested in this, but a new video is coming out soon called A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies. I saw the first part of it in Seattle at a film festival, and it's really terrific -- a great cinema history lesson and surprisingly funny. Scorsese is very engaging. It's quite long, but if you're really into movies, you couldn't find a better way to spend an evening.
Back to homepage
Reviews A to F
Reviews G to L
Reviews M to R
Reviews S to Z
Search