kargman

The sex scenes aren't the greatest, but I have a weakness for movies of this type: a wonderfully, needlessly complicated plot about rich degenerates who pay huge sums of money to attractive young people to have sex with one another, and with them. Stephanie Beaton is a gorgeous redhead who's apparently used self-tanner to get her skin the same shade of red as her hair, so that in her several nude scenes, she looks like a coppery pool of lusty womanhood, especially the writhing scene at the very beginning of the film. There are a few nice twists and turns at the end. It's not Body Heat or anything, but it's pretty damn good for a Skinamax soft core flick.

You can always tell a B-movie that takes BDSM for a theme is gonna be a stinker when it quickly becomes clear that the filmmakers don't know the difference between bondage and SM, because they use the terms interchangeably. If the plot involves an SM snuff flick, you know it's gonna be an evil stinker.

Primal Instinct is the story of a parole officer investigating the death of her sister, who was a bondage site model. The portrayal of the bondage site reveals that the creators had never been on the Internet, much less visited a porn site, and had gotten all their info about what porn sites are like from the real-life equivalents of Maude Flanders.

This film is even more mean-spirited, stupid and ignorant about its subject matter than 8mm was. (8mm also deals with an investigation of the death of a professional woman specializing in BDSM whose death shows up in a snuff flick.) Primal Instinct is not the worst movie ever made but it does suck in every respect. Michael Madsen and the female lead do their best, but god, it just isn't even close to being enough to stand down the cretinous dreck that's being shovelled here.

Somebody attempted to praise "The Outer Limits" by saying that "It doesn't use science fiction." By which I think they meant it didn't rely heavily on spaceships and man-eating monsters and such. But if you'll read the written SF of the 50s and 60s, you'll discover that SF didn't used to consist of repeated plays on well-defined themes. SF was once a writer going slam-bang against the unknown, trying to create worlds that don't exist. It was exciting to read because you never knew WHAT the hell you'd find in the next story.

The Outer Limits is the same way. There's the usual dross, some weak episodes, but some of them are just mind-blowing, like "Demon With A Glass Hand." There's still some SF writers -- Vernor Vinge, Iain Banks, Greg Benford -- who can write stories that bring your mind smack up against the unknown. But no TV series has ever matched the Outer Limits.

Twilight Zone? Pfui. Basically a horror series.