No, Fifty Shades Of Grey doesn’t count.
Released in March 1998, Wild Things was one of those movies that on the surface was all sex and violence, but actually had much more going on underneath than anyone would have guessed… not terribly unlike Neve Campbell’s character, Suzie Troller.
Suzie is the high school outcast, but both she and Kelly (Denise Van Richards) accuse their school counsellor Sam (Matt Dillon) of rape.
While he continues to protest his innocence, during the court-case Suzie eventually snaps under the pressure and admits that she and Kelly made it all up just to get back at him for some perceived slight against them.
His life now in ribbons, Sam sues the school for defamation, makes off with a tasty settlement, but it turns out that he was in on it the whole time with Suzie and Kelly, and the three plan to run off together… and that all happens within the first twenty minutes of the movie!
That is without even mentioning that Kevin Bacon, Bill Murray (?!) and Robert Wagner are all involved, while the plot takes so many sexy twists and even sexier turns that you’ll find it hard to keep up.
Wild Things is, in short, a masterpiece of the grotty erotic thriller sub-genre, and we absolutely love it.
Clip via YouTube Movies
The 1990s was a great time for these kind of movies, and while they weren’t all good, they were all incredibly watchable: Basic Instinct, Disclosure, Cruel Intentions, The Last Seduction, Bound…
And then, for whatever reason, they just kind of… disappeared.
Came, and went, as it were.
Quite why Hollywood has shied away from sexy movies isn’t something that is immediately clear. It can’t be financial reasons, as the recently explosive popularity of the Fifty Shades trilogy resulted in a combined global box office in excess of $1.3 billion.
It can’t be the fact that stars of today aren’t interested in doing sex scenes anymore, because … well, they are. In the last few months alone, see: Charlize Theron in Atomic Blonde, Jake Gyllenhaal in Stronger, Armie Hammer in Call Me By Your Name, Margot Robbie in I Tonya, James Franco in The Disaster Artist, Emma Stone in Battle Of The Sexes, even Tom Cruise got his in American Made.
We’re personally hoping that it is just a cyclical, fashionable thing, and they’re just out of favour right now, and all it needs is one great example to bring them back into the spotlight.
If Stanley Kubrick can attempt to make sex into an artform for Eyes Wide Shut, as did Paul Thomas Anderson for Boogie Nights, then surely we can get a decent director, decent screenwriter and a couple of decent actors to come together (ahem) for a decent erotic thriller?
The money is there for the taking, Hollywood. You just have to arouse our interest first…
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