With his sham neck brace and irreverent wisecracks, he opens up an offshoot of wry humour that the film then follows with it’s subsequent layering of ‘shocking’ twists, each more incredulous than the last. Snooping detective Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) smells a rat and, as he starts tailing the trio – whom he believes orchestrated the entire fiasco, Lombardo included – bodies start piling up…īill Murray’s smooth-talking lawyer is among the first signposts that Wild Things isn’t your cookie-cutter erotic thriller. Murray’s Bowden – a scene-stealing proto-Saul Goodman – unravels a thorny conspiracy between the two teens and Lombardo’s name is cleared. Lombardo employs circumspect lawyer Ken Bowden (Bill Murray) to defend him. The two appear to be mortal enemies, united only in their claims against the incredulous teacher. Suzie is a backwater outcast, far-flung from the privileged upbringing Kelly has enjoyed. It might’ve been an open and shut empty claim if fellow-student Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell) hadn’t followed suit. Lombardo becomes embroiled in a sex scandal when he’s accused of rape by Richards’ Kelly Van Ryan. Opening with George Clinton’s low-down, dirty (and impeccable) score, helicopter shots cruise the everglades, redolent of treacherous waters and – between the thick clusters of reeds – myriad winding paths for high school guidance counsellor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) to navigate aboard his hovercraft. But look closer and you’ll find a wry smile and a ripe, pulpy script (kudos Stephen Peters), one that invites us to participate and enjoy the myriad twists and turns it has in store. John McNaughton’s flick was dismissed as more of the same in some quarters. Shows like The Sopranos, Oz and Six Feet Under were just around the corner, ready to package adult material for the comfort and sophistication of highbrow TV viewers, and the erotic thriller had for a long time become something of a joke in the culture, viewed as dimly as the summer camp slashers of the previous decade. Appearing in 1998, it was toward the tail-end of the cycle. Wild Things sits apart from much of the erotic thriller genre, however, chiefly thanks to how self-aware it is. And yes, on occasion it can prove fun to dive into this seedy, often shambolic sub-genre and reel in the confusion of what the creatives were thinking. There are devotees of this movement who howl at the lacklustre dialogue and chemistry, and who champion some of the baffling sex scenes offered up for our leering gaze. For the rest of the decade viewers were peddled increasingly trite and tired courtroom dramas and office scandals, all serving as a scant facade for a look at some celebrity skin. The erotic thriller boom of that decade – a phenomenon now catered for by prestige TV streamers – actually began the decade before with Adrian Lyne’s soft-core thrillers Fatal Attraction and 9 1/2 Weeks, but it was Paul Verhoeven who powered it’s ascendance with 1992’s Basic Instinct. A wet hot summer all of it’s own, it was clear from the outset that Wild Things was continuing the ’90s insatiable lust for, well… lust. Skin as The Internet swept the globe in a fervent cacophony of dial-up screams. Stepping out of a swimming pool in a see-through swimsuit and flicking her hair, Richards – wittingly or not, but one assumes the former – became the poster babe for horny young websites like Mr. While the zenith of these is her turn as beauty queen wannabe Becky Leeman in Michael Patrick Jann’s under-appreciated mockumentary gem Drop Dead Gorgeous, her work as entitled teen Kelly Van Ryan in Wild Things serves as quite the second string. For a short while, if you wanted a haughty-but-hot Republican bitch, nobody did it like Denise Richards. But while she’s never been the greatest actor in Hollywood, some of those roles suited her to a T. It’d be easy to besmirch the latter day career of Denise Richards, whose reality TV persona often feels like a warped mirror image of the kinds of roles she was nabbing in her late ’90s heyday. Stars: Denise Richards, Kevin Bacon, Matt Dillon
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