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Despite a game performance from Stone, the lackluster sequel was savaged by critics, mocked by audiences, and only made back $38.6 million of a $70 million budget. The last gasp of the '90s erotic thriller may have come with the arrival of Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction, an embarrassing 2006 film that attempted to re-spark an old flame by pairing Sharon Stone with the very-much-not-Michael Douglas-like David Morrissey. The last one feels especially relevant: why go out to the theater to see Sharon Stone and Michael Douglas in a sex scene when you can stream far more explicit sexual acts right from your laptop? The choice, for many, was obvious. It's hard to pinpoint exactly when the genre began its decline, but the downtick can likely be attributed to a few factors: the much-discussed decrease in the number of mid-budget Hollywood films, the shrinkage of the direct-to-video market, and the rise of readily available pornography via the internet. At the time, it looked like the reign of the erotic thriller would last forever. The late '90s saw the genre become more experimental and daring in the ways it portrayed sexuality on screen, with movies like the Wachowski siblings' Bound (1996), David Cronenberg's Crash (1996), and John McNaughton's softcore cable classic Wild Things (1998) finding new ways to provoke, confound, and, yes, titillate. In the wake of Basic Instinct, we got less-well-known movies with vaguely sensual titles like Consenting Adults (1992), Body of Evidence (1993), and the Bruce Willis(!)-featuring Color of Night (1994). In the '90s, things got crazier than a party at David Caruso's fuck house.
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Surprise: audiences liked watching attractive people take off their clothes and solve mysteries. Noirs like Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944) and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958) offered genuine psychological tension without the nudity, but '80s films like Brian De Palma's Dressed to Kill (1980), Lawrence Kasdan's Body Heat (1981), and Paul Schrader's delightfully bonkers Cat People (1982) effectively set the stage for the sexy eruption of movies to come. Of course, like any genre, there were various offshoots, ripoffs, and predecessors to the Douglas, Stone, and Eszterhas glory days. These movies vary wildly in tone, veering from genuinely intense to winking self-parody, but they're unified by violent plot twists, seedy sex scenes, and hilariously vulgar dialogue, like, "I do the fucking, I never get fucked!" and "Fucker! Fuck off!" They are glorious. Here's a quick list of some of the movies Eszterhas wrote: the Glenn Close courtroom thriller Jagged Edge (1985), the leg-crossing bombshell Basic Instinct (1992), the less-beloved Sharon Stone vehicle Sliver (1993), the David Caruso in a " fuck house" experiment Jade (1995), and the camp classic Showgirls (1995).
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Sex in offices! Sex in public places! Sex in the kitchen with a pants-less Michael Douglas!īesides Douglas, who was unquestionably the charming face of '90s male paranoia, there's one more big name from the genre's heyday you need to know: Joe Eszterhas, an enormously successful Hollywood screenwriter who now looks like a very rich werewolf. In most erotic thrillers, the plot is an old-fashioned noir or a corporate thriller with an extra twist: lots of sex. What the hell happened to erotic thrillers over the past 15 years or so? And could they actually be making a comeback? and Bill Clinton eras, was yes. While the actor embodied the erotic thriller in a trio of movies ( Fatal Attraction, Basic Instinct, and the unapologetically absurd Disclosure) with his preening arrogance in both the bedroom and the boardroom, Douglas eventually aged out of his sexual conquistador period, and the genre entered an accompanying downswing.īut with the Morris Chestnut-starring When the Bough Breaks grossing a surprising $16.6 million in its opening week, it's worth taking stock of the type of film that helped define steamy sex for a generation of moviegoing adults and teens with access to premium cable.
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The answer, for most sentient humans during the Reagan, Bush Sr. But for years the upper echelon of erotic thrillers was defined by a simple question: do you want to see Gordon Gekko's posterior from a flattering angle? The genre is rife with other tawdry, sweaty elements - femmes fatales "trapping" men in morally compromised situations, tastefully lit sex scenes in spacious office buildings with glass bricks, poor little bunnies boiling in pots. In the late '80s and early '90s, the mainstream erotic thriller was all about Michael Douglas' ass.