Oh! You pretty things!

Film: Wild Things

You know, there’s that thin, vibrating line where something bad actually becomes good. There are bad films, and then there are so bad things that you just have to laugh at clumsiness with which they were made. And then there are films that are so bad that you can’t really say whether they were meant as a parody or not. Take “Signs”, for example, a film notorious for having aliens who can be killed with water, coming to conquer planed consisting ¾ of water. This film, from beginning to the end a rip off of all “watch the sky” films and TV shows, but also of several horror standards, is so much a mess of a film that it’s creators later claimed that it was intended to be a farce; Not enough to convince me, though.

And then there is “Wild things”, my favourite bad film. Yep, it’s that film in which youngster Denise Richards shows her B00BZ. A film made by stock director John McNaughton, was riding a wave of sex thrillers; But what separated this film from others was a complete lack of regard to anything but sex scenes, with hilarious results. You’ll see how time is measured by sex scenes in this film. These characters live from one sex scene to the other. And if that’s the case, they should’ve at least put more of such scenes. Instead, there is one actual sex scene, cut short so that authors could later sell uncut version too, and two teasers.

It’s actually kind of sad that this film that should be considered rotten-tomato classic, remains forgotten, buried under the pile of slightly more memorable sex thrillers made during nineties. Those who come to see the film will probably come for sex. Disappointed by overall lack of it (they’re all already shown in trailer anyway), they’ll hardly bother to notice how stupidly funny the film is.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Oh, wait, one more thing: I just want to say that this film is probably the most embarrassing for good actors who took a part in it: Matt Dillon, Kevin Bacon, Theresa Russell, and good comedian Bill Murray who seems to think that there’s no such thing as bad film. Particularly Dillon, Kopola’s fave neighborhood gangster, tells some of the stupidest and driest lines in this flick; And while Murray manages to be funny and Bacon to be intriguing, Russell’s role here is more a cameo than a real role, so I can’t really figure out why a respectable actress like her agreed to lend her appearance to this mess. As for Denise Richards and Neve Campbell, they’ve never outgrown roles of teenage sex symbols anyway.

Now we can start from the beginning:

We meet Sam Lombardo (Dillon), high-school guidance councilor; We meet Kelly van Ryan, a rich momma’s daughter, always flirting with Lombardo. She is, of course, called Van Ryan because all rich American families have surnames that sound exotic. We meet another high-school girl, a social outcast Suzie Marie Toller (Campbell). Then follows the first sex scene.

It’s somewhat notorious scene where Kelly and her friend wash Mr. Lombardo’s cars in tight jeans shorts and practice for Miss. Wet Shirt competition, wasting ten times more water than a normal car-washing requires. It’s hard not to recall of how this scene was parodied in “Zoolander”, where a bunch of pretty-mannequin boys wash car on a gas pump with a lot of water-sprinkling around, until one of them decides to get back at his pals using gasoline sprinkler.

It is very important to notice that this scene cuts the introductory part of the film. What follows is the story, and by schedule, we’ll have a chance to see the next sex scene only after the whole story is over. Seems like a long wait, but it will prove to be much shorter than expected, and we’ll see why.

Ok, now routine: Kelly returns home crying and informs her mother Sandra van Ryan (Russell) that she was raped by righteous Mr. Lombardo. Enter the stage pair of detectives: Ray Duquette (Bacon) and Gloria Perez (Daphne Rubin-Vega). They investigate the case and find another underage victim of Mr. Lombardo: Suzie Marie. Enter the stage Kenneth Bowden (Murray), who brings a bit of (intended) fun into film, with his role of lawyer - more a con-man, and his cardboard office. He is the only one who accepts defending Mr. Lombardo against vengenceful rich woman. As it turns out, defense wasn’t so hard; Holes in Suzie Marie’s statement are obvious and Bowden manages to crush her accusations very quickly. Being that Suzie Marie’s case was the only proof for Kelly’s case, Lombardo is a free man now. And he’s granted a big sum of money from Van Ryan’s trust fond, as a compensation.

But wait! Remember when I was talking about plot twists and how every Hollywood thriller has to have them? Well, it turns out that it was all a plot by Lombardo, Kelly and Marie Suzie, to rob Kelly’s mother. Her motivation is rather lousy here, but 17 year old spoiled brats aren’t known for good judgment anyway. As it turns out, Lombardo really is sexing up minors, only not against their will. And that’s where second sex scene jumps in. Threesome. Anything to please the audience.

Third scene comes along shortly and it is rather short anyway – it features Kelly getting out of the pool while water slides along her curves... And that’s about all that this film had to say.

So what’s the problem then, you ask. What is so different here from any other lousy wanna-be thriller made in Hollywood? Well, the thing is, everything I told to far, fits in less than an hour. The story is so simple and straight-forward, lacking in details, that it takes no more than an hour to tell it. And that’s where makers of the film are in trouble, because every feature has to last at least closely to hour and a half. How to fill the remaining time? We’ll see in just a few moments!

I can’t really say how it happened that the film was too short; I don’t know whether it was scriptwriters or directors fault. If this problem occurred in scriptwriting, the best thing that writer could do was to return and rewrite the story, expanding it by adding more details. But then again, scripts have a rather standard size and if finished script was too short for a feature film, it would be obvious from it’s size; Studio would never accept such script. My guess is that the scriptwriter was aware of the shortness, but he was too lazy to fix it properly so he added a fake ending. My guess is also that director couldn’t care less but to fix scriptwriter’s mistakes, so he left it at that.

But let’s see more closely what happens after everything important happened. So, Lombardo, Kelly and Suzie Marie turned out to be in cahoots, and they had a wild threesome with Champaign-pouring. Now, all that is left is to wrap up the story, to make them either kill each other, ride into the sunset and live happily ever after, or get caught by good cop Ray. But as I said, authors have at least half an hour more to do.

So Lombardo kills Marie Suzie! It turns out that he and Kelly were in cahoots to use her and then get rid of her by, why not, adding a murder to an innocent con. Now they could stop there, they’d have 1:20 worth of film, and it’d still be just an average bad sex thriller. But now they got greedy for time so they went on with the same formula.

Because enter the good cop Ray, who murders Kelly and in a very naively unlikely set of circumstances, gets released for self-defense. Then it turns out that Ray and Sam Lombardo were in cahoots to first kill Marie Suzie (Marie Suzie, whatever), then to kill Kelly, and then to take all the money away for themselves. Are Sam and Ray gay lovers? It’s not explicitly said, but it’s known that the director threw out the scene where two guys shower together; His explanation was that it was a gratuitous scene so he didn’t want it in. Now I ask you, how can it get any more gratuitous than this? Well, film is in essence a few gratuitous sex scenes, with a bit of plot to connect them! Anyway, imagine poor Sam who had to go three-ways with Kelly and Marie Suzie just to talk them into the plan, while all this time he desired only men! Come to think of it, throwing out gay subplot was probably a good idea – at least one thing less that doesn’t make sense.

You know what happens then? Faking a boat accident, Sam kills Ray! Then Suzie Marie appears from dead and it turns out that she wasn’t actually dead! She was pretending all this time! It was their plan all along to fake Suzie Marie’s murder, so that they could make Ray kill Kelly, so that later Sam could kill Ray! What an ingenious masterplan!

And then – you know, I’m not even sure anymore, all this conning with plotholes awaiting to be discovered, but I think that Suzie Marie and Bowden (Sam’s lawyer if you forgot) con Sam for money. I think they’d go on but they were left out of characters. They should’ve introduced more in first part of the film, then they could go on with this for hours: A and B kill C; D appears and kills A with B; E appears and kills B with E. That way, who knows in whose hands money would end up.

Yep, that’s my favourite bad film. All this ridiculous plot-twisting simply buys me. Let’s all laugh at the expense of people who made it:

Ha ha ha!

posted by Srdjan @ 12:38 PM