Deadly Embrace (1989).

Directed by David DoCoteau

Written by

Starring

The Stage.

Chris gets a job as a pool boy for the summer at the home of Stewart and Charlotte, a wealthy couple in an unhappy marriage. It doesn’t take long before you realize not all is as it seems, and when Chris’s girlfriend Michelle gets involved, it becomes a tangled web of sexual, deadly intrigue.

The Review.

This is a decent erotic thriller that just happens to meander a little bit too much. The film starts with Chris being interrogated by a detective, who’s trying to crack some kind of case. These scenes were definitely added in post, because it literally only shows their hands the whole time and both voices are a product of ADR. My first thought was that they probably just wanted a better way to frame the story, but after seeing the film, it actually feels more like they edited the film and only had a 45 minute movie, so in order to get another 45 minutes of footage, they added ten minutes of these stupid interrogation scenes and 35 minutes of the lead actresses standing around naked in front of a poorly lit backdrop, and I’m not even exaggerating.

The first time we get one of these inserts is when Chris arrives at the house - after he unpacks his stuff (which consists of like…a t-shirt, a big framed picture of his girlfriend, and a giant answering machine, he heads to bed and starts to play with himself. Then we see this vision of Linnea Quigley, teasing us and undressing in a low, blue light. It’s understandable, he’s fantasizing. That shortly then changes to Charlotte, one of the homeowners. Again, understandable. What’s not understandable is how those same visions are played CONSTANTLY throughout the film.

The movie only really has four characters - Stewart, (played by Jan Michael Vincent), a philanderer who wants to divorce his wife Charlotte but is concerned that if he does, she’ll take half of what he owns. We know this because his lawyer asks if he signed a prenup and he responds, “A pre what?” Charlotte, his wife, is obsessed with Chris and has an old school video camera hidden so that she can peek into the guest house. It doesn’t take long to turn the seemingly faithful Chris into her own personal fuck boy. Chris is a kind of naive college kid who has almost no personality and looks like my friend Ray. Then there’s Michelle, his girlfriend who aspires to be an actress and spends most of the movie on the other end of a phone. At about fifty minutes, she arrives at the house to visit, and you can see the jealousy of Charlotte starting to shine through, but the treachery really only kicks off when there’s like fifteen minutes left in the film.

The End.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that wasn’t rated X with this many sex scenes in it, and they’re long…like ten minutes each kind of long. Way too long. This film is easily a short without the dumb exposition cop scenes and the elongated sex scenes, and because of that it’s actually really boring and I found myself wanting to fast forward a lot of the second half of it. You’d expect that since the violence was restrained until the last few minutes of the movie that it would end with a bang, but it ends up fizzling out in an uninspired, corny way. It’s an easy skip.