Opinion

Oo-er! Things are getting a little steamy around here as Anton van Beek reminisces about the heyday of the big-budget erotic thriller and wonders why Hollywood studios seem so scared of sex these days....

I've been thinking a lot about Bruce Willis recently. Not, as you might assume, wondering why he's fallen so much from grace he's remaking Death Wish and filling the shelves of your local supermarket with endless direct-to-DVD dubs, but about his 1994 movie Color of Night, where a hitherto unseen part of the Willis anatomy made a surprise appearance. The subsequent publicity was used to pull in moviegoers looking to enjoy a steamy evening at their local multiplex.

In case you're one of those unfortunate souls who never had the pleasure of seeing this (Golden Raspberry) award-winner, Color of Night cast action star Willis as a psychiatrist who (1) goes colour blind after one of his patients jumps to her death from his office window, (2) visits an old friend who is murdered soon after, and (3) embarks on a sexually explicit relationship with a mysterious woman who has a secret link to many of the patients in his dead chum's therapy group. And, most importantly, Bruce Willis’ willy puts in an appearance. As you can see, you missed out on a real humdinger. Still, Scott Bakula and Lance Henriksen are also in it (although, it should be noted, their willies are not), so it's not all bad.

Anyway, back to the issue at hand. Color of Night was one of the wave of erotic thrillers that followed in the wake of Sharon Stone forgot to put any underwear on and crossed her legs in Paul Verhoeven's saucy 1992 box office hit Basic Instinct. For a while it seemed impossible to watch a film at the cinema and not see an A-list actor stripping off and indulging in all sorts of kinky fun and games. Who could forget Jeremy Irons canoodling with Juliette Binoche in 1992's Damage, or Willem Dafoe and Madonna playing with candles in 1993's Body of Evidence? I can't, and I wish I could.

The same period saw an avalanche of straight-to-video flicks starring one or other of the two Shannons (Tweed or Whirry), which filled the shelves of rental stores, and Channel 5's late-night schedules.

In the 1990s the erotic thriller was seriously big business. Which is how you ended up with a major Hollywood studio paying Joe Eszterhas (writer of Sharon Stone flicks Basic Instinct and Sliver) a whopping $1.5m for just a two-page outline for what we become the steamy William Friedkin-directed 1995 flop Jade.

The Twilight effect
As bad as so many of these movies were, I still view them with a certain nostalgia. After all, I can't imagine a major studio doing anything similar today.

While television has become less and less prudish (thanks largely to the efforts of cable networks such as HBO), cinema has gone in the opposite direction. It's almost as if the pro-abstinence message at the heart of the Twilight movies has now infected the thinking of the whole of Hollywood. Meanwhile, the ongoing debate surrounding 'problematic' content (which seems to believe that ignoring something is better than confronting it head on and addressing it directly) has basically rendered the whole sub-genre effectively taboo.

The closest the industry has come recently was the Fifty Shades… franchise. Yet that terrible trilogy's insultingly passive female lead was a huge step back from the ferocious, strong-willed women that dominated the thrillers of the 1990s.

As with so many things to do with cinema these days, maybe our last hope lies with superheroes. Back in September DC published an adults-only ‘Black Label’ comic (Batman: Damned – Book One) that featured a naked Batman and his Batmember in several panels. If only DC was willing to take a similar risk with its struggling superhero movie universe, then maybe adults would have a comic book movie worth getting hot under the collar about…