by Nathan Rabin
In 1993’s Body Of Evidence, Madonna’s costume designers shoot for Old Hollywood glamour, but dead-end at dowdy and unflattering. Naked, Madonna is so flawless and creepily synthetic that she looks like a sentient sex doll. While it may be unseemly to dwell on her appearance, Body Of Evidence’s plot turns on her sexual desirability. Even the title is a panting double entendre about her character.
It’s never an encouraging sign when a film repeatedly has to broadcast its femme fatale’s sexiness. It should be evident in the way she walks, in the sway of her hips, and in a flirtatious glance, not in stiffly recited dialogue. Yet early in Evidence, opposing lawyers Frank Dulaney (Willem Dafoe) and Robert Garrett (Joe Mantegna) both feel the need to assert Madonna’s attractiveness before the jury.
“She’s a beautiful woman,” Garrett thunders. “But when the trial is over, you will see her no differently than a gun or a knife, or any other instrument used as a weapon. She is a killer, and the worst kind—a killer who disguised herself as a loving partner.” Now, far be it from me to challenge the veracity of anything said by Joe Mantegna, but I would argue that the worst kind of killer is one who wears a necklace made out of puppy skulls and a rain poncho made out of the torsos of murdered kittens. That’s, perhaps, worse than a killer disguising herself as a loving partner.
Madonna’s Rebecca Carlson has been accused of killing a wealthy lover with a bum ticker and an appetite for light bondage. Her weapon: awesome erotic overstimulation. Yes, it’s murder by sex, as Garrett tries to convince a jury that Rebecca fucked her elderly lover to death by deliberately inducing a fatal heart attack during kinky, drug-fueled canoodling.
Half moribund courtroom thriller, half erotic thriller, Evidence alternates between florid scenes of sex-saturated courtroom shenanigans and endless, graphic romps in which Rebecca introduces Frank to the joys of public handjobs in crowded elevators, rough sex atop broken glass on the hood of a car in a parking garage, candle wax, champagne, and masturbation/bondage.
Alas, by the time Evidence flopped in theaters, Madonna’s nudity was a wildly degraded commodity, thanks largely to the 1992 coffee-table book Sex, an encyclopedic compendium of kinks and carnal cravings designed to satisfy fetishes of every stripe. By 1993, the public was more familiar with the sight of Madonna’s genitalia than their own.
Evidence tries to one-up Basic Instinct through the sheer quantity of its sex scenes, but it backfires. I never thought I would think this, but deep into the film, I got bored looking at Madonna’s naked breasts. As a weird little kid, I was convinced that Madonna was a shameful harlot who would pollute the minds of innocent young people like my sister with her sinful devil music and brazen sexuality. Then adolescence hit and I became disproportionately grateful for Madonna’s harlotry and devil music. Yet by the time I rewatched Body Of Evidence for this Case File, even I was suffering from Madonna exhaustion.
Sexploitation movies like Body Of Evidence fail at the box office in part because, all things considered, people enjoy masturbating in the comfort and privacy of their own home. How successful would even the funniest comedy be if audiences were legally forbidden from laughing in public? Would you want to plunk down $10 to see the new Judd Apatow movie if there were a chance you’d be arrested for shamelessly pleasuring your funny bone in full view of the general public? That’s not such a problem if a dirty movie has artistic aims or social relevance, but Evidence nurses no ambitions beyond providing masturbatory fodder.
Body Of Evidence oscillates artlessly between legal pulp and softcore porn until a big shocking final twist reveals that Madonna’s strangely robotic sexual con artist is, in fact, the evil, duplicitous villain she appeared to be all along. Cue her violent death by gunfire, and roll credits.
With Evidence, one of the world’s most popular sex symbols bombed as a screen vixen. Then again, I’m not entirely convinced that Camille Paglia didn’t will Madonna into existence sometime in the late ’70s. It’s as if Paglia was sitting around one day and thought, “Wow, if only there was one virgin-whore-bitch-goddess-sinner-saint-icon-God who could embody every pretentious idea I’ve ever had. Then I’d be set.” Bam! Suddenly a full-grown Madonna materialized out of thin air and began masturbating with a big black crucifix while dressed as Elvis.
Maybe they can include this film in a Paglia-taught class on, I dunno; Madonna, androgyny, gender subversion, and sadomasochism in popular culture as a form of social protest as part of an elective credit devoted to colossal wastes of everyone’s time.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure
Sex-Fantasy Island Case File #97: Exit To Eden
Originally Posted December 27, 2007
Here at My Year Of Flops Incorporated, we’ve explored a broad spectrum of unsexy sex films that collectively put the “blechhh” into sex. With this entry I’ll explore the mother of all unsexy sex films: 1994’s Exit To Eden, a once-in-a-lifetime cross between HBO’s Real Sex and Love, American Style. It’s a transgressive erotic drama! No, it’s a wacky diamond-smuggling comedy with Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd! No, it’s a transgressive erotic drama and it’s a wacky diamond-smuggling comedy with Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Aykroyd!
It’s a surreally misguided attempt to make the kinky world of bondage and sadomasochism palatable to mainstream audiences by dressing Dan Aykroyd like the Gimp from Pulp Fiction and putting Rosie O’Donnell in revealing dominatrix gear. In the overheated parlance of the panting summary on the back of its video box, the film offers the scintillating promise of O’Donnell “thigh-high in leather and studs with a personal slave-boy to fulfill her every whim.” That, apparently, was supposed to be a major draw: the prospect of Rosie O’Donnell squeezed into tight leather. Is there a more surefire erection killer this side of graphic photo books about the final stages of syphilis? How can anyone become comfortably aroused with the prospect of a half-naked O’Donnell looming just around the corner?
Sex and comedy are a tough combination to pull off. When was the last time you watched a sex comedy and found yourself thinking, “Wow! I’m laughing uproariously and I have a raging erection!” It’s been illustrated time and time again that sex and comedy go together only when sped up and accompanied by Boots Randolph’s “Yakety Sax.” But what happens when the sexy stuff isn’t sexy and the funny stuff isn’t funny?
Exit To Eden began life as a non-comic erotic romance novel pseudonymously written by Anne Rice. Yes, there are some books that fill even Anne Rice with shame. It’s never an encouraging sign when even a woman who dresses like an extra in a Bauhaus video well into middle age doesn’t want to be publicly associated with a project.
What cinematic sensualist was called upon to bring Rice’s erotic vision to the big screen? Adrian Lyne? David Lynch? How about the nice old grandfather behind Happy Days and The Other Sister? Exit To Eden was shepherded onto the big screen by Garry Marshall, a filmmaker with a preternatural ability to transform everything he touches into a banal sitcom.
So a straight erotic drama was turned into a cop comedy/Vaseline-smeared touchy-feely New Age romance. Exit To Eden’s starring cast combines two people who have no business starring in a big Hollywood film (Paul Mercurio and Dana Delany) and two people who have no business parading about publicly in S & M gear (Aykroyd and O’Donnell).
It’s an old story, really. Lisa Emerson (Delany) was a doormat until an older lover introduced her to Dr. Martin Halifax (Hector Elizondo), who uttered magical words that would change her life: “I am a top, a master. You are a bottom, a submissive. Yet we are not different. We are in unison, to please each other. Just tell me your wishes. Welcome to my world … It is a world in which you have all the choices. You are a victim in life. I will teach you to always be in total control. I will teach you never to be a victim ever again. Never.”
Dr. Halifax is the Yoda of deviant sex. I expected him to continue: “Life victim you are. Teach you I will. Control total will you have.” A wallflower no more, Lisa becomes the headmistress of a fantasy p
leasure island where she rules over an army of slaves and submissives, including Elliot Slater (Paul Mercurio), a love-struck photographer who made the mistake of photographing a pair of diamond smugglers played by Stuart Wilson and David Bowie’s wife.
When the diamond smugglers head to Lisa’s Pleasure Island to track down the negatives, wisecracking cop Sheila Kingston (O’Donnell) and partner Fred Lavery (Aykroyd) follow in hot pursuit, hoping to get to Elliot before the bad guys can retrieve the photos with extreme prejudice.
Once the film makes it onto the island, it veers among three distinct tones: the giggly, embarrassed sex comedy about O’Donnell and Aykroyd; a New Age romance; and the thriller-by-numbers action of the diamond-smuggling plot, which feels arbitrary even by the lenient standards of gratuitous diamond-smuggling subplots.
To help pass the time, I pretended Exit To Eden was secretly a Kubrickian science-fiction drama about a mysterious island staffed and populated entirely by sex androids. That would explain a lot, from the robotic performances and affectless line readings of Delany and her minions to the dearth of plausible human emotion on display. Certainly flesh-and-blood human beings would never utter lines like the following:
Very good, pretty eyes. Now I’m going to let you feel what you so much wanted to see.
Elliot was intrigued by erotica, but reticent to try it until now.
In this era of fringe-group lunacy, shouldn’t we also preserve freedom of choice for this most intimate of choices: sex?
The BDSM elements of Exit To Eden amount to little more than kinky window dressing for a vanilla romance between a woman reluctant to give up power for fear of getting hurt, and a man afraid of embracing his kinks out of fear of being branded a pervert. Just how staggeringly banal and wholesome is the film’s fierce head dominatrix? When Elliot asks Lisa what she likes best in bed, she giggles, “What do I like to do best in bed? I like to giggle. Cuddle and giggle. After a long day of smacking people, it’s nice to cuddle.”
It’s a measure of the film’s almost comic inertness that I wound up thinking, “I hope they get back to that scintillating diamond-smuggling subplot. All this sex is boring me to tears.” Over 120 glacially paced minutes of cinematic torture, the film somehow manages to make kinky sex seem dull and tacky.
Exit To Eden is a doddering old square’s take on the outer limits of sexuality, a blandly sentimental romance decked out in leather, lace, and spikes. In case there’re any lingering doubts about its romance-novel soul, O’Donnell’s narration ends with the following moral: “So what did I learn from this case? No matter what your sexual preference, true love is still the ultimate fantasy.”
Exit To Eden was a huge critical and commercial flop domestically, though it did much better in Japan under the title Happy Sexy Go-Go Naked China Beach Lady Fun Movie. Exit To Eden was supposed to open minds and liberate repressed libidos. Instead, it’s an unintentional infomercial for sexual repression.
Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success? Failure
Maniacal Death-Orgy Case File #107: Tough Guys Don’t Dance
Originally Posted April 16, 2008
Norman Mailer was a hero to many. He never meant shit to me. Though I have a soft spot in my heart for anyone with Mailer’s genius for self-promotion (as seen in his tome, Advertisements For Myself), I have a hard time getting past the tough-guy posturing. Given Mailer’s reputation, it’s a miracle that he made it well into his 80s without dying of testosterone poisoning or meeting an undignified end wrestling a mountain lion. If Ernest Hemingway is the god of the great literary church of machismo, the great alpha-male all other two-fisted, hard-drinking wordsmiths prostrate themselves before, then Mailer is at least a minor saint, especially now that he’s bare-knuckle brawling angels up in heaven.
Mailer toiled diligently to create the impression that he wrote with a half-empty whiskey bottle in one hand, a sawed-off shotgun in the other, and a dead hooker at his feet. Acolytes could be forgiven for imagining that he had gasoline and bourbon running through his veins.
Writer-director Mailer’s 1987 thriller was the product of a brief period when beloved Israeli schlock merchants Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, the geniuses behind The Apple and Over The Top, tried to buy a little respectability by throwing money at famous (or at least notorious) figures and hoping against hope that great art (or at least healthy commerce) would ensue.
So in the span of just a few years, Golan and Globus produced Barbet Schroeder’s Charles Bukowski adaptation Barfly and Death Wish 4: The Crackdown, Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear and Braddock: Missing In Action III, Norman Mailer’s Tough Guys Don’t Dance and Masters Of The Universe. It’s tempting to place Mailer, that distinguished man of letters, on the side of artists and deep thinkers, but Tough Guys Don’t Dance isn’t even smart, pretentious trash. It’s pretty much just trash.
Some DVDs are worth renting just for their trailers. Tough Guys Don’t Dance is such a film. In the theatrical trailer, “America’s most controversial author” addresses the camera directly while clutching a fistful of comment cards from a test screening. “Bold, innovative, wonderful!” crows the first one. “Stinks!” jeers the second. The comments that follow swing drunkenly between rapturous praise and scathing condemnation. “A movie not to miss” is followed by “a giant death orgy with lots of maniacs.” “One of the best, most original films I’ve ever seen” is chased by “One of the worst ever. My grandmother could do better.”
I could go on, but I’ll skip over the praise and center on the hateration. “Whoever wrote this has never read a good book,” Mailer reads from one card, before hurling it aside in a manner that unmistakably conveys, “Read a good book? I’ve only written, like, every good book, ever!” Ever the showman, he saves the best for last, literally winking at the screen after rasping, “The devil made this picture.” That is clearly the highest praise Mailer has ever received.
This ballsy “You’re probably going to hate this filthy, disgusting, hateful movie, which is an affront to good people and basic decency” approach was probably the smartest way to sell Tough Guys. The trailer isn’t selling quality so much as danger, image, attitude, sex, sleaze, and Mailer himself. Mailer’s performance throughout is a marvel: He’s deadpan, but a shameless ham. If the film that this trailer so indelibly promotes were half as entertaining as its auteur reading comment cards, it’d catapult instantly to the upper tier of Secret Successes.
So it pains me to report that as far as giant death orgies with lots of maniacs go, Tough Guys Don’t Dance is unforgivably dull. Or at least that’s what I would have told you after seeing it for the first time. At the risk of contradicting myself, I would like to take back everything I’ve just written. I was shocked and delighted to discover that upon repeat viewings, nearly all of Tough Guys’ flaws become subversive strengths. I knew going in that Tough Guys was a polarizing film. I never imagined that my opinion of it would shift so radically the second time around, from visceral hate to warped appreciation.
My reaction represents in microcosm the public’s split response to many cult movies and notorious failures: loathing and ridicule, followed by revisionist acclaim. Cult films often fail in their initial release as art and drama, only to succeed with future generations as comedy and camp.
But enough pussyfooting: Let’s get to the booze, broads, bodies, and bullets. You know, the good stuff. In his greatest bad performance, a ghostly pale, perpetually hungover, sex-obsessed Ryan O’Neal (such a Method actor!) stars as Tim Madden, a bartender, writer, chauffeur, drug dealer, and full-time fuckup in the midst of a downward spiral. His days blur together in a dispiriting orgy of drinking, fucking, and blackouts, interrupted by the occasional discovery of decapitated heads and accidental tattoo acquisition. Oh, and he might be a murderer. Or he might be getting set up by a psychotic, weed-addled small-town police chief (Wings Hauser) with a closet full of skeletons and a disconcerting habit of waving around a giant machete while stoned and drunk.
Or the guilty part
y might be a foppish bisexual multimillionaire dandy with an irresistible jones for the low life and a grudge against Tim for stealing his party-girl wife, Patty (Debra Sandlund). Tim and Patty, incidentally, met when Tim and his then-girlfriend Madeline Regency (Isabella Rossellini) answered a personal ad for orgy partners placed in Screw magazine by Patty and her then-husband (magician Penn Jillette), a group-sex-loving, fantastically well-endowed preacher named Big Stoop. During my first viewing, I remember thinking, “You know, this movie isn’t anywhere near as much fun as a film with an orgy involving Isabella Rossellini, Ryan O’Neal, and Penn Jillette as a group-sex-loving, fantastically well-endowed Southern preacher named Big Stoop should be.” The second time around, however, I dug the surreal incongruity of it all, particularly the words, “He must have the longest cock in Christendom,” coming out of Ingrid Bergman’s daughter’s impeccably sculpted mouth.
Mailer caught flak throughout the years for his perceived sexism, but this film nobly depicts womanhood in its infinite variety. The film’s strong, empowered female characters range in personality and disposition from cum-crazed cock addicts to jizz-hungry fuck monkeys to sex-obsessed orgy enthusiasts.
In addition to slipping the debauched likes of Patty and his ex-girlfriend the old salami surprise, Tim makes sweet, sweet love with a former porn star–turned–society wife (Frances Fisher) while her emasculated husband watches in horror. What initially struck me as bad pulp and vulgarity minus any redeeming energy or vitality eventually came together as a Gothic, tongue-in-cheek parody of blood-splattered tough-guy melodrama.
