A man walks into a cluttered room, settles in, and slowly begins to unpack its contents: dusty pulp novels, VHS tapes of long-forgotten films with titles like Illicit Dreams, Secret Games, and Lipstick Camera that flicker to life in all their low-res glory on a tiny TV set. A narrator (Anthony Penta) identifies this man as an archivist (Michael Reed), and he’s searching for a story behind a genre of movie that once populated the shelves of video rental stores, its popularity exploding in the late 1980s and early 1990s with the advent of home video and the ability to watch in the privacy of your home requiring a need for a lot of movies to be made quickly and cheaply, and fading out in the early 2000s due to a myriad of factors, including the accessibility of videos on the internet, the over-saturation of more mainstream hits in video stores, and the rise of DVDs and Blu-rays, which prompted more consumers to purchase and collect movies as opposed to renting them.
It’s the erotic thriller, a type of narrative that merged sex with danger, pleasure with pain, desire with obsession and violence. The fascination with softcore erotica has never exactly gone out of style; within the last year, on her popular podcast “You Must Remember This,” host Karina Longworth has delved deep into these films and how they played into what was happening in pop culture and the political landscape at the time in ongoing series titled “Erotic 80s” and “Erotic 90s.” And yet, the genre itself is virtually nonexistent today, living on in some form in the guise of cable-friendly Lifetime Channel original movies and the occasional higher-profile direct-to-streaming feature (2021’s The Voyeurs, with its campy thrills and strict adherence to genre tropes, is probably the best example, while 2022’s Deep Water, from genre staple Adrian Lyne, promised a return to form but more poked at said tropes rather than fully leaning into them). Those who have studied and tracked the arc of the erotic thriller over the years may not find a ton of new information in director Anthony Penta’s We Kill for Love (subtitled The Lost World of the Erotic Thriller); the analysis of the climatic housewife versus single career woman showdown in 1987’s Fatal Attraction, for example, is well-tread territory. And yet, there’s plenty of merit in Penta’s sprawling, nearly three hour documentary, from the perspectives offered by its numerous interviewees— who range from authors and historians to the directors, writers, and actors who made the movies— to the mere fact that it frames its discussion not wholly in the context of the big theatrical movies we all know, but the direct-to-video offerings that they spawned.
We Kill for Love reaches way back— back to the 1940s, discussing how film noir and movies such as 1944’s Double Indemnity planted the seeds for what would become the contemporary erotic thriller: dangerous women and plots that merged criminal activity with thinly-veiled implications of sexual desire. Even later in the film, the connection is made between gothic romance and erotic thrillers; the former was concerned with women’s quest for true love to fill a gap that was lacking in her marriage or otherwise, while the latter swapped out romantic fulfillment with sexual fulfillment. And it explores how erotic thrillers drew their common themes, such as voyeurism, from Alfred Hitchcock and later Brian De Palma’s fascination with watching. Regardless of its lengthy runtime, We Kill for Love rarely flags in its focus or pacing, and while it devotes ample time to tackling some of the genre’s most famous entries, such as Fatal Attraction and Basic Instinct, it always does so in service to its primary subject of direct-to-video films, from the interchangeable nature of their titles (illustrated by the swapping out of various magnetic words on a board) to the way the same themes and symbols manifested themselves over and over again. One of the more interesting discussions breaks down the difference between those big studio movies and the direct-to-video ones: the former centered more on the male perspective and male desires, while the latter shifted the focus to the women. Seeing as how the target audience for erotic films is generally assumed to be men, it’s nice to see this movie break down their appeal for both men and women. For cinephiles especially, it’s a joy to see the breadth of knowledge of frames of reference on display here, and even if it had little of merit to say, We Kill for Love performs the indispensable task of unearthing these movies that likely no one who didn’t work on them remembers anymore merely by mentioning them; the credits at the end of the movie list nearly 250 erotic thrillers (and that list doesn’t include the adjacent noir films and TV series the films also addresses). Many of those that were released straight to VHS were never rereleased on DVD or any other format; as the VHS faded into obscurity, the movies faded away right along with it.
We Kill for Love is essentially a talking heads documentary, but it is well-structured and edited according to topic (even if the whole archivist framing device feels unwieldy and unnecessary, and Penta’s accompanying narration overly flowery) and includes a well-rounded group of perspectives. Some of these interviews are more intriguing than others; James Dearden, screenwriter for Fatal Attraction, for example, provides some fascinating and surprisingly heartfelt insight into the making of that movie, specifically the decision to completely change the ending (and, by extension, the film’s ultimate message), while screenwriter Tom Lazarus exhibits some real Burt-Reynolds-as-porn-producer-Jack-Horner-in-Boogie-Nights energy as he earnestly waxes on about how even with these direct-to-video movies, they were all focused on making art, not merely content for viewers to get off on. That’s not to say that We Kill for Love is all-encompassing, however, and the lack of perspective, or skewed perspective, in some instances is glaring. Take the discussion of Sharon Stone’s famous panty-less leg-cross playing femme fatale Catherine Tramell in 1992’s Basic Instinct. The commentators dissect this motion as a power move on Tramell’s part, while actress Jodie Fisher wonders, “how it felt for Sharon Stone to be doing that movie and doing that scene, because she looks completely badass and comfortable and really, really powerful.” No one broaches the subject, however, of how in interviews around the mid-2000s and most recently in her 2021 memoir, The Beauty of Living Twice, Stone alleged that she was not made aware on set of the explicit nature of the nudity that would be visible on screen, and didn’t realize it until a test screening much later on. Some other questionable tangents come into play in the documentary’s final act, during its discussion of the erotic thriller’s downward spiral. One commentator posits that consent culture played a role in killing the erotic thriller, because the nature of seduction in those movies hinged on the lack of outright consent. That’s a line of thinking that I can’t fully get behind, for a few different reasons (William Hurt’s famously ridiculous yet hot chair smash in Body Heat likely wouldn’t fly in a movie today, and yet there’s little question that in that scene Kathleen Turner’s femme fatale is playing him like a fiddle). And the inclusion of a Ted Cruz campaign ad that was pulled because one of the actors featured in it used to star in adult movies (and the line between erotic thrillers that contained simulated sex and pornography became blurred in many people’s minds over time) certainly raises some eyebrows; using right-wing fear of being even tangentially publicly associated with anything illicit is more a provocative example of the struggles these actors faced in the post-VHS era than a thoughtful or surprising one.
Ultimately, however, these flaws are minimal. Maybe you remember this era, those movies with titles and covers that all sounded and looked the same, that even spawned sequels, that revolved around the same recurring group of actors (one actress recalls in the documentary how she was in so many of them she often couldn’t remember what movie she was performing in at any given time). Maybe you don’t, or maybe you weren’t alive yet. Regardless, anyone who possesses even a tangential interest in erotic thrillers and film history at large will be able to pull a wealth of entertainment value and knowledge from We Kill for Love, which wears its passion and even a sense of playfulness on its sleeve (in one of his interviews, multi-hyphenate talent Andrew Stevens recalls how he once saw actors on posters get special recognition by having a box put around their name in the credits; note how Stevens’ name appears in the end credits of this movie). As long as projects like this exist that keep them in the collective consciousness, erotic thrillers will never truly die.
We Kill for Love will be available to watch on demand on all digital platforms on September 1. Runtime: 163 minutes.
Katie at the Movies 