Sensation

Sensation is an early 90's erotic thriller with a great cast and quite a unique premise. Lila (Kari Wuhrer) is a college student and an artist whose picked for a very unique study. She is tasked by psychologist Ian Burton (Eric Roberts) to sense items for feelings or who they belonged to. Soon she begins seeing violent and sexual visions caused by the items which leads her to believe he must be the killer.

All of the above got me interested and hankering watching this and I was severely disappointed. I like erotic thrillers and this era was the goldmine for them Color Of Night, Jade, etc. Etc. Sadly the only good thing about this film is the cast and introduction. There is little to no substance to this film, nudity took up an unruly amount of time and felt like it was there to pad the weak script. I generally appreciate the mystery aspects of these style of films, but even that aspect was quite boring and predictable.

This film is one you should skip, the performances are good but forgettable. However the rest of this film is very much a waste of time. I hate being hard on film makers because it's an art and artists want their pieces of art to express something however this expresses nothing of value or interest in my opinion.

3 out of 10 for the great cast and good acting.

Sensation is a very erotic thriller that breathes hot, heavy and hard all over its audience, almost overpowering the murder mystery at it's center with the large number of sex scenes throughout. It's essentially trash, and wouldn't be worth much of a mention if it weren't for some great actors, and an opening score that sets an eerie mood the film hardly deserves. Eric Roberts is Dr. Ian Burton, a college teacher who is looking for people with vague psychic abilities, for some sort of research. Enter stunning Lila Reed (Kari Wuhrer), a student with the unique ability to experience an object or person's past simply by physical contact. Roberts is in fact looking for the person who murdered his lover, unbeknownst to her, and jumps at the chance to use her talent for his investigation. Many suspects run about, there's sex scenes between Roberts and Wuhrer, in which her abilities flash back to... even more sex scenes from the past, and it's all a wee bit disorganized, but oh well. Ron Perlman, always welcome, shows up as a Detective who thinks he can crack the case, winding up in over his head as well. There's also a bizarre and inexplicable cameo from a creepy Ed Begley Jr. who hassles Kari in a bar and runs off as quick as he showed up, never to be seen again. It's sleazy late night cable fun, without much to go crazy over except the actors, and that score I mentioned. Oh and.. you know... all the naughty bits, of which there is an overload

Despite a promising start and an intriguing premise, this film falls apart, and winds up being little more than a fairly routine and predictable thriller. Kari Wuhrer does a good job as the lead, and Roberts and Perlman are solid as usual, but all the good ideas in this film were used up in the first half-hour. The killer seemed obvious to me for much of the film, and things were further hindered by the needless character that was played by Ed Begley, Jr. Considering how impressive the opening was, this turned out to be quite the disappointment.

B-movie stars Roberts and Wuhrer are appropriately cast in this slick B-flick which tells of a young woman who has psychometric visions in which she sees her college professor as a sex crazed murderer. As one might expect, Wuhrer vamps it up showing off oodles of skin while Roberts teeters between legit and psycho in an attempt to hold audience interest in the absence of a real story. Titillation and psychobabble are the hallmarks of this lame hodge-podge of murder, sex, and the paranormal. Okay for adult couch potatoes in the mood for a sexsational no brainer. (C-)

This popped up in my Prime recommendations. Seeing the talent, I decided to give it a watch.

Not terrible, but I literally had to laugh at how dated the "erotic thriller" genre has become. There's just an absurd amount of gratuitous nudity and soft core sex (you know, the kind where the...um..."parts" don't quite line up right). When they're not having soft core sex, Kari Wuhrer is dreaming about soft core sex - like, a lot.

This genre drove cable subscriptions ("Cinemax: we have more breasts than HBO"), and always got a lot of real estate video rental stores, but in the modern internet age, it just comes across as kind of tame and silly.

If you strip out the gratuitous titillation, it's basically a 70s-esque plot about a (hot) college student who has paranormal abilities and gets recruited but a (hot) college professor surreptitiously uses her to try to solve the murder of his former girlfriend (did people really say "lover" in 1994?) - or is it to cover up his own involvement?

Anyway, the acting is decent, and they throw in enough red herrings that I really didn't see the end coming.