My Year of Flops (28 page)

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Desperotica Case File #86: Body Of Evidence

Originally Posted November 20, 2007

Body Of Evidence
combined something audiences have always responded to positively (Madonna's sexuality) with something audiences have historically never responded to positively (Madonna's movies). Though Madonna has become synonymous with flops, she's racked up a few hits:
Desperately Seeking Susan, A League Of Their Own,
and
Dick Tracy
. A good rule of thumb: If a film instantly becomes a pop-culture punch line, then it's a Madonna movie. If it succeeds, it's a film Madonna happened to appear in.

In Jose Canseco's autobiography,
Juiced,
the Hulk-like steroid proponent writes that Madonna pursued him relentlessly during his baseball heyday, but that he found her insufficiently attractive. This struck me as absurd. In what universe is Madonna underqualified to give Jose Canseco a handjob?

Yet there's nothing natural about Madonna's sex appeal. It's a matter of attitude and lighting, iconography and shrewd calculation, exhibitionism and a finely honed gift for provocation. It's telling that many of Madonna's most fruitful artistic collaborations are with photographers and music-video directors. Depending on the angle and the outfit, Madonna can look like Marilyn Monroe reborn or the boogeyman's grandma.

In 1993's
Body Of Evidence,
Madonna's costume designers shoot for Old Hollywood glamour, but dead-end at dowdy and unflattering. Naked, Madonna is so flawless and creepily synthetic that she looks like a sentient sex doll. While it may be unseemly to dwell on her appearance,
Body Of Evidence
's plot turns on her sexual desirability. Even the title is a panting double entendre about her character.

It's never an encouraging sign when a film repeatedly has to broadcast its femme fatale's sexiness. It should be evident in the way she walks, in the sway of her hips, and in a flirtatious glance, not in stiffly recited dialogue. Yet early in
Evidence,
opposing lawyers Frank Dulaney (Willem Dafoe) and Robert Garrett (Joe Mantegna) both feel the need to assert Madonna's attractiveness before the jury.

“She's a beautiful woman,” Garrett thunders. “But when the trial is over, you will see her no differently than a gun or a knife, or any other instrument used as a weapon. She is a killer, and the worst kind—a killer who disguised herself as a loving partner.” Now, far be it from me to challenge the veracity of anything said by Joe Mantegna, but I would argue that the worst kind of killer is one who wears a necklace made out of puppy skulls and a rain poncho made out of the torsos of murdered kittens. That's, perhaps, worse than a killer disguising herself as a loving partner.

Madonna's Rebecca Carlson has been accused of killing a wealthy
lover with a bum ticker and an appetite for light bondage. Her weapon: awesome erotic overstimulation. Yes, it's murder by sex, as Garrett tries to convince a jury that Rebecca fucked her elderly lover to death by deliberately inducing a fatal heart attack during kinky, drug-fueled canoodling.

Half moribund courtroom thriller, half erotic thriller,
Evidence
alternates between florid scenes of sex-saturated courtroom shenanigans and endless, graphic romps in which Rebecca introduces Frank to the joys of public handjobs in crowded elevators, rough sex atop broken glass on the hood of a car in a parking garage, candle wax, champagne, and masturbation/bondage.

Alas, by the time
Evidence
flopped in theaters, Madonna's nudity was a wildly degraded commodity, thanks largely to the 1992 coffee-table book
Sex,
an encyclopedic compendium of kinks and carnal cravings designed to satisfy fetishes of every stripe. By 1993, the public was more familiar with the sight of Madonna's genitalia than their own.

Evidence
tries to one-up
Basic Instinct
through the sheer quantity of its sex scenes, but it backfires. I never thought I would think this, but deep into the film, I got bored looking at Madonna's naked breasts. As a weird little kid, I was convinced that Madonna was a shameful harlot who would pollute the minds of innocent young people like my sister with her sinful devil music and brazen sexuality. Then adolescence hit and I became disproportionately grateful for Madonna's harlotry and devil music. Yet by the time I rewatched
Body Of Evidence
for this Case File, even I was suffering from Madonna exhaustion.

Sexploitation movies like
Body Of Evidence
fail at the box office in part because, all things considered, people enjoy masturbating in the comfort and privacy of their own home. How successful would even the funniest comedy be if audiences were legally forbidden from laughing in public? Would you want to plunk down $10 to see the new Judd Apatow movie if there were a chance you'd be arrested for shamelessly pleasuring your funny bone in full view of the general
public? That's not such a problem if a dirty movie has artistic aims or social relevance, but
Evidence
nurses no ambitions beyond providing masturbatory fodder.

Body Of Evidence
oscillates artlessly between legal pulp and softcore porn until a big shocking final twist reveals that Madonna's strangely robotic sexual con artist is, in fact, the evil, duplicitous villain she appeared to be all along. Cue her violent death by gunfire, and roll credits.

With
Evidence,
one of the world's most popular sex symbols bombed as a screen vixen. Then again, I'm not entirely convinced that Camille Paglia didn't will Madonna into existence sometime in the late '70s. It's as if Paglia was sitting around one day and thought, “Wow, if only there was one virgin-whore-bitch-goddess-sinner-saint-icon-God who could embody every pretentious idea I've ever had. Then I'd be set.” Bam! Suddenly a full-grown Madonna materialized out of thin air and began masturbating with a big black crucifix while dressed as Elvis.

Maybe they can include this film in a Paglia-taught class on, I dunno; Madonna, androgyny, gender subversion, and sadomasochism in popular culture as a form of social protest as part of an elective credit devoted to colossal wastes of everyone's time.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Sex-Fantasy Island Case File #97: Exit To Eden

Originally Posted December 27, 2007

Here at My Year Of Flops Incorporated, we've explored a broad spectrum of unsexy sex films that collectively put the “blechhh” into sex. With this entry I'll explore the mother of all unsexy sex films: 1994's
Exit To Eden,
a once-in-a-lifetime cross between HBO's
Real Sex
and
Love, American Style
. It's a transgressive erotic drama! No, it's a wacky
diamond-smuggling comedy with Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd! No, it's a transgressive erotic drama
and
it's a wacky diamond-smuggling comedy with Rosie O'Donnell and Dan Aykroyd!

It's a surreally misguided attempt to make the kinky world of bondage and sadomasochism palatable to mainstream audiences by dressing Dan Aykroyd like the Gimp from
Pulp Fiction
and putting Rosie O'Donnell in revealing dominatrix gear. In the overheated parlance of the panting summary on the back of its video box, the film offers the scintillating promise of O'Donnell “thigh-high in leather and studs with a personal slave-boy to fulfill her every whim.” That, apparently, was supposed to be a major draw: the prospect of Rosie O'Donnell squeezed into tight leather. Is there a more surefire erection killer this side of graphic photo books about the final stages of syphilis? How can anyone become comfortably aroused with the prospect of a half-naked O'Donnell looming just around the corner?

Sex and comedy are a tough combination to pull off. When was the last time you watched a sex comedy and found yourself thinking, “Wow! I'm laughing uproariously
and
I have a raging erection!” It's been illustrated time and time again that sex and comedy go together only when sped up and accompanied by Boots Randolph's “Yakety Sax.” But what happens when the sexy stuff isn't sexy and the funny stuff isn't funny?

Exit To Eden
began life as a non-comic erotic romance novel pseudonymously written by Anne Rice. Yes, there are some books that fill even Anne Rice with shame. It's never an encouraging sign when even a woman who dresses like an extra in a Bauhaus video well into middle age doesn't want to be publicly associated with a project.

What cinematic sensualist was called upon to bring Rice's erotic vision to the big screen? Adrian Lyne? David Lynch? How about the nice old grandfather behind
Happy Days
and
The Other Sister
?
Exit To Eden
was shepherded onto the big screen by Garry Marshall, a filmmaker with a preternatural ability to transform everything he touches into a banal sitcom.

So a straight erotic drama was turned into a cop comedy/Vaseline-
smeared touchy-feely New Age romance.
Exit To Eden
's starring cast combines two people who have no business starring in a big Hollywood film (Paul Mercurio and Dana Delany) and two people who have no business parading about publicly in S & M gear (Aykroyd and O'Donnell).

It's an old story, really. Lisa Emerson (Delany) was a doormat until an older lover introduced her to Dr. Martin Halifax (Hector Elizondo), who uttered magical words that would change her life: “I am a top, a master. You are a bottom, a submissive. Yet we are not different. We are in unison, to please each other. Just tell me your wishes. Welcome to my world … It is a world in which you have all the choices. You are a victim in life. I will teach you to always be in total control. I will teach you never to be a victim ever again. Never.”

Dr. Halifax is the Yoda of deviant sex. I expected him to continue: “Life victim you are. Teach you I will. Control total will you have.” A wallflower no more, Lisa becomes the headmistress of a fantasy pleasure island where she rules over an army of slaves and submissives, including Elliot Slater (Paul Mercurio), a love-struck photographer who made the mistake of photographing a pair of diamond smugglers played by Stuart Wilson and David Bowie's wife.