While preparing another entry in the February Love Bites mini-season of horror and horror-ish movies with love and romance as an element if not necessarily a theme, I’ve been working up the courage to watch TWILIGHT. But each time I start it, I end up switching it off after a few minutes. It’s like when you keep putting off going to the doctor to get those anal warts seen to. Only more painful and humiliating.
Possibly I’ll build up some sort of resistance, and repeated attempts will let me watch more and more of it. In the meantime, I was unexpectedly reminded of this forgotten film from the Eighties, directed by the late Ken Russell, a flamboyant English filmmaker who became known for breaking ground in terms of sexuality, with movies like THE DEVILS (1970) scaring the crap out of the Catholic Church and the middle classes. Probably his most famous work to horror fans of a certain age was THE LAIR OF THE WHITE WORM (1988), which also introduced future superstar Hugh Grant to the world.
Director Ken Russell with Kathleen Turner. Turner’s on the left.
Russell had an intelligent but hallucinatory style, and few of his movies were ever released without some level of controversy being generated (His own response to this was quoted as, “This is not the age of manners. This is the age of kicking people in the crotch and telling them something and getting a reaction. I want to shock people into awareness. I don’t believe there is any virtue in understatement.” If you need a quick way to describe him, try “David Lynch’s cultured English cousin.”
In 1984, he made CRIMES OF PASSION, inadvertently creating a new subgenre that would later be called “the erotic thriller”, softcore pap that would populate late night TV and the top shelves of video stores and give the likes of Shannon Tweed a career for a decade or so. Of course, Ken Russell, being Ken Russell, couldn’t just give us something generic and boring, oh no.
Bobby regretted attending the TWILIGHT Fan Club meeting
The movie opens on a group therapy session, attended by electronics shop owner Bobby (John Laughlin, THE LAWNMOWER MAN). He’s not a member, coming along only to support his friend Donny (Bruce Davison, X:MEN), but when some of the group members taunt him that maybe his protestations about having a warm and happy marriage, his denials quickly crumble like my diet promises in front of a pizza buffet.His wife Amy (Annie Potts, who played Janine the secretary in the GHOSTBUSTERS movies) is frigid, preferring to sit and watch their newly-installed cable than get intimate with Bobby (this scene also treats us to a gratuitous segueway to a fake MTV music video that perfectly captures what they were like 30 years ago).
Meanwhile, we cut to China Blue (Oscar nominee Kathleen Turner, ladies and gentlemen), giving a tearful acceptance speech for being made Miss Liberty, while sitting spread-eagled in an gynaecological chair while a man kneels between her legs. One minute please while I ponder what I just wrote. Afterwards, she rewards the supplicant man by working on his flute. One more minute please…
To be honest, I’d go to church if Tony Perkins was my preacher!
And while that is going on, we cut to a peep show booth, where we meet the third point of what will become the movie’s triangle: Reverend Peter Shayne (Anthony Perkins. Yes, *the* Anthony Perkins) sniffs amyl nitrate and watches a bored stripper (Janice Renney, SAVAGE DAWN) languidly sashays. One more minute please… he rushes outside to begin street preaching abotu all the sin and fornication going on. China Blue walks by, they exchange pleasantries (“Save your soul, whore!” “Save your money, shithead!”).
Later we see China Blue being pursued by an unknown man, but it’s no one we’ve met so far, but rather her next customer, and in the post-coital conversation, it becomes clear that she gives different life stories, even different accents, to different johns. It shouldn’t be a surprise, really – just because they serve you doesn’t mean they like you – but it adds mystery as to who China Blue really is.
The Reverend’s looking up an old friend…
It’s Bobby who will soon find out on our behalf, as he moonlights as an impromptu private eye for a fashion company owner who suspects one of his designers, Joanne Crane, is selling designs to the competition. Bobby follows her to her sunlit LA home, and later as she leaves, clad in a blonde wig and trenchcoat to Skid Row, where she becomes China Blue. It’s like Bruce Wayne changing into Batman. Only with more blowjobs.
Bobby secretly watches and listens as China Blue once again verbally spars with Reverend Shayne, the latter erratically jumping back and forth between confident affirmations that he will save her, to outright misogynistic hatred that this “big mouth cooze with the motor-driven ass” can tempt him so. The dialogue is all sexual innuendo and ancient jokes that had whiskers on them when I was a teenager (“we’re all out of Pam Am Coffee, but there’s still plenty of TWA Tea…”). Shayne also carries around with him a wide variety of sex toys in his bag. Just to demonstrate how disgusting it all is, you understand.
“There’s no avoiding it, Kat – JEWEL OF THE NILE is shit.”
Eventually, the real corporate spy is discovered, but Bobby keeps to himself Joanna’s secret identity, eventually visiting her himself as a customer. But he touches her in ways she hasn’t been touched before (I mean emotionally, you perverts!). And as they eventually meet again, both on the street and at her home, the emotional barriers Joanna keeps up to avoid intimacy through China Blue’s antics begins to crumble, even as Bobby begins to work up the courage to put behind the sterile suburban family life he has set up for himself.
But the Reverend Shayne is still around, has discovered China Blue’s secret identity as well, and is still prepared to save her. Even if he has to kill her to do it.
It’s Turner who really drives CRIMES OF PASSION, giving a ballsy, dynamic performance (not many actresses would be willing to get into BDSM gear and sodomise a policeman client with his own nightstick – at least, not on film) that basically epitomises the “hooker with a heart of gold” trope (although, not as fairy tale as Julia Robert’s later performance in the risible PRETTY WOMAN, it’s still a “movie whore” role bearing little resemblance to the harsh travails genuine sex workers must undergo).
50 Shades this, bitches…
After the initial release and subsequent success of ROMANCING THE STONE earlier that year, she unsuccessfully if understandably tried to get out of this movie. She needn’t have worried, because she puts some real acting chops into this while only having to flash a little skin. You can see her conflicting emotions as she tries to stay cool and streetsmart for customers whose sad, lonely lives threaten to touch her emotionally (a latter scene, where she encounters a dying man whose wife hires China Blue to make her husband feel like a man for one last time, shows a level of vulnerability and maturity you don’t expect in a movie like this).
Looks like a prop from a Cenobite porn film…
And Anthony Perkins is seemingly having the time of his life (his character was originally supposed to be a shoe salesman, but he suggested making him a preacher to Russell in order to offer a more satirical attack on American mores). Watching this first when I was a horny 18 year old, I was interested in the sex and explicit dialogue. Watching it now as a divorced 48 year old, I realise now how funny it was (Shayne’s weapon of choice is a giant sharpened vibrator he nicknames “Superman”), the chemistry between Perkins and Turner palpable, their characters dancing around mutual contempt and intrigue.As for John Laughlin’s performance as Bobby… well, not everyone gets to turn it up to 11. But he still brings the Everyman role to life, the guy who still clings to his youth with puerile jokes, but crumbles when his wife finally confesses that she’s faked her enjoyment of sex all these years just because it seemed so important to him.
Tony Perkins in drag. Because it’s expected.
And of course it’s still a Ken Russell film, so we still get all his stylistic touches, including dizzying zoom in/out shots, quick cutaways to the paintings of Aubrey Beardsley and John Everett Millais into sex scenes, and a sense that there is something more to what you’re seeing, even if you don’t fully understand what’s going on (the synth soundtrack is from Russell collaborator and prog rock legend Rick Wakeman, who also appears in the aforementioned music video). And true to form, Russell’s polemic against Western sexual hypocrisy was skewered by the studio, who on its initial release made savage cuts to the scenes of sex but not the violence.
CRIMES OF PASSION is available in sleazy places everywhere, and the original trailer is below. Probably not the ideal Valentine present, but then Valentine’s has passed, so why are you looking for one now you cheap bastards?
Deggsy’s Summary:
Director: Ken Russell
Plot: 5 out of 5 stars
Gore: 4 out of 10 skulls
Zombie Mayhem: 0 out of 5 brains
Reviewed by Deggsy. In a discreet brown paper bag.
Filed under: 1980's, Deggsy's Corner, Movie Reviews, New Posting
