Scorned (1993).
The Stage.
In this erotic thriller, a woman decides to destroy the Weston family from the inside after she blames them for her husband’s suicide.
The Review.
Shannon Tweed rose to fame in the early-80’s via Playboy, becoming the Playmate of the Year in 1982. She started her acting career shortly after, scoring an extended role in the daytime soap Days of Our Lives and tons of roles in one-off television episodes and B-movies. In the late 80’s and early 90’s, she started riding the wave of lesser known erotic thrillers, films that really took advantage of at least two of her…very robust talents. I was recently reading through some discussion about Vinegar Syndrome films and her catalogue came up as some recommendations for their library. I realized that, even with over a hundred acting credits to her name, I had never seen a Shannon Tweed film, so I picked Scorned, a film that was only ever released on VHS and laserdisc in the United States. Luckily, someone was kind enough to let me borrow an English-language German Mediabook version that was released on Blu-ray in 2018 with a run that only lasted 250 copies, so this baby is rare.
The plot is nearly a copy of 1992’s The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, but with way flimsier motivations for a woman who is clearly just deranged. Shannon Tweed plays Patricia Langley, a housewife to her husband Truman. Truman works for an architectural firm and he’s looking to secure a big partnership with some big businessman named Mason Wainright. They have Mason over for dinner, and he makes a move on Patricia. She’s horrified, of course, but in a shocking twist, her husband tells her that he has basically given Mason the greenlight to rape her in order to secure the job, and that she needs to take one for the team. What a company man. In a very uncomfortable scene, she reluctantly lets it happen, and the old creep grunts for about 45 seconds and leaves. The next day, Truman goes into the office with an extra pep in his step the next day only to find out that he didn’t get the partnership, that it’s been given to Alex Weston, one of his co-workers. Realizing he’s been cucked and bought a Camaro he couldn’t afford for nothing, he blows his brains out in his office.
Now, from the outside looking in, I feel like Patricia should be mad at the man who raped her and her spineless husband for letting - nay, inviting this happen to her, and while she does hold Mason responsible, she doesn’t blame her husband as much as she does the man who got the partnership, Alex Weston. She vows to go after him, his wife Marina, and his son, the only person on planet Earth named Robey. She arms herself with the best ammo in this kind of situation - information - and gets to work. Seems Marina has an addiction to pills and Robey is an idiot who’s not doing well in school, so she gets into the house under the guise of a tutor and starts trying to tear the family apart from the inside. She uses familiar tactics like trying to leave subtle hints that Alex is cheating on her, starts drugging her by putting pills in tea and coffee, seduces the high school senior son, and bangs his dad while he watches. The only person really suspicious at first is their Cuban housekeeper, Belle.
The plan seems sound enough, but soon after she infiltrates the Weston residence, we realize that Patricia is just batshit crazy. It doesn’t feel like she’s doing this for revenge as much as it feels like she’s just kind of roleplaying a fantasy of evil upon the family, most of whom didn’t have anything to do with Alex getting the job. For example, I can see why she’d seduce the son in order to turn him against his father, but when she goes back for a second helping, it’s hard to see why. He’s 17, surely he’s not great in the sack. She definitely enjoys it, at one point introducing the young buck to a copper cock ring. And she really lost all sympathy from me when she went after the only person on to her rouse, the innocent housekeeper. Then again, it didn’t seem like we were supposed to feel sympathy for Patricia at that point, we were just kind of along for the ride to see how far this evil woman would take things.
The film was directed by a guy named Andrew Stevens, a guy who wrote the early 90’s erotic thriller series Night Eyes 1,2, and 3, then disappeared for years until he popped up in 2007 to direct Half Past Dead 2, the sequel no one wanted to the Steven Seagal film no one wanted in the first place that replaced that ponytailed loser with WCW’s Goldberg and Death Row rapper Kurupt. He also directed a film called Fire Down Below - again, not the Steven Seagal film, but one with another braindead Hollywood asshole, Kevin Sorbo. There’s nothing that stands out about the direction here, but it’s easy to point out the haphazard editing, which frequently switches tones in such a jarring way that I’d have thought it was intentional in the hands of a crew with more skill. As it is, the film feels sloppy and rushed. The script, written by Barry Averich, is unoriginal and formulaic. More like Barry Below Averich. The real bright spot in the crew is Shannon Tweed, who I thought did a great job as the maniacal tutor. She had some real sly facial expressions that added a certain charm to her cruel debauchery as she attempted to pick people off one by one.
The End.
While not a strong film overall, I did have some fun watching it because it was so ridiculous and kind of surreal. Like I’ve said before, now, the erotic thriller genre is all but dead, so films like this that truly feel like softcore pornography at times just feel really out of place. My wife walked in while I was watching it and thought I was watching a porn…an easy mistake to make, as the one scene she walked in during was the one where Patricia was masturbating with her window open because she realized the son was spying on her. The fact that she actually sat through the next hour of it, however, is proof that there’s something compelling about it, whether you’re watching it for the sex - of which there is quite a bit, the bad acting, or just to see how things unravel in this fantastic web of flawed human beings. It’s tough to recommend this holistically, but I am interested in checking out more Shannon Tweed films, and it seems like Tubi has a few streaming.
