“After tonight, the three of us are not to be seen together ever again.”
Wild Things is unapologetically sleazy and sexualized. It features a great cast that is committed to the camp aesthetic, which allows the film to tightrope between schlock and outright debauchery. It’s basically a mid-budget exploitation film—trash cinema with decent production value. Everyone involved, from screenwriter Stephen Peters, to director John McNaughton, to the cast seems to know that’s what it is and each plays their part with a sly wink. When the camera slowly pans all over the young body of Denise Richards, when Kevin Bacon roughhouses young women, when Bill Murray pops up from behind an office partition wearing a ridiculous neck brace—it’s all done without a hint of pompousness. It’s schlocky on purpose. It’s the kind of lurid fun that makes you feel a little bit icky in the moment, and in retrospect might seem like a waste of your time. But it’s really very good for what it is—which Roger Ebert expertly described as “a three-way collision between a softcore sex film, a soap opera and a B-grade noir.” I think that’s an accurate summation. The scene with the threesome—which has become a routine interview subject for those involved—may be the reason people remember Wild Things, but the film as a whole is better than that provocative bit of raunch.
Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) is a high school counselor. He’s a fairly good-looking dude who sleeps with half the women in Blue Bay and hopes to marry into money. High school senior Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards), the richest brat in the posh community, finds herself coping with daddy issues by lusting after Lombardo. She has daddy issues because she doesn’t have a dad anymore; her father killed himself because her mother, Sandra Van Ryan (Theresa Russell), is an absolute maneater who sleeps with her poolboy and “just doesn’t know” why her husband offed himself. As the descriptions of the characters may suggest, Sandra Van Ryan and Sam Lombardo have been sleeping together as well. Added to this little quagmire is a high school rival named Suzie Toller (Neve Campbell), a grungy misfit who lives in a trailer by herself and drives a rusted out Beetle. Lombardo has apparently gone out of his way on multiple occasions to help her out, and he was even the recipient of her only phone call when she was arrested. So these two young gals exhibit mutual hate because they both have a crush on the same thirty-five year old guidance counselor. Quite the situation.
Almost as excessive as the film’s sexualization of high school age girls1 is its ridiculous number of plot twists. You learn that there is a conspiracy pretty early, but you don’t actually have the relevant information to unravel it until the credits, where a handful of crucial snippets that were previously withheld are given now to explain the wild plot. The movie begins with Kelly sitting in the front row of the school’s auditorium in a crop top, eyeing up Lombardo, who approaches a chalkboard on the stage and writes “SEX CRIMES.” He welcomes Sergeant Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) and Detective Gloria Perez (Daphne Rubin-Vega) to take the podium and discuss date rape, sexual harassment and other related topics. Suzie bails on the seminar before the presenters say a single word, informing her classmates that Sergeant Duquette can kiss her rear end. A few short scenes later, we’ve seen enough interactions between the characters to understand the situation between the teacher and his two young students. Or at least we think we do.
Over the weekend, Kelly appears at Lombardo’s home to wash his Jeep. She says it’s for “a good cause” but it’s really so we can watch the silicone-enhanced Denise Richards get sprayed with a garden hose and then enter Lombardo’s home uninvited and dripping wet. At this point, the script begins deliberately skipping over chunks of the narrative so that it can rip the rug out from under us again and again. After the soggy clothes in the living room episode, Kelly accuses Lombardo of rape. When she becomes aware of the allegations, Suzie does too. Enter Bill Murray, who basically plays himself posing as a shady lawyer. But—where most actors deserve to catch flack for “playing themselves,” Bill Murray playing Bill Murray is almost always a good thing, and it’s definitely a good thing here. Anyway, during the trial, the whole thing appears to unravel. Under scrutiny, Suzie reveals that Kelly put her up to the whole thing. Suzie wanted to get back at Lombardo for failing to bail her out of jail on a minor drug charge, and Kelly hated that he was sleeping with her mom instead of her. Tempers rise and objects are thrown, and almost everyone is duped. Because most of it was an act. Sandra Van Ryan breaks her daughter’s trust fund to pay millions of dollars to settle with Lombardo, which was the most crucial piece of the trio’s scheme. Now Sam, Kelly, and Suzie can abscond to the yacht life with overflowing pockets.
It is less than an hour into the film when the three of them meet in a seedy motel, pop champagne and start licking each other. On the one hand, sex is nothing new in Hollywood. It sells, that’s why the most popular actresses are good-looking and the best actresses don’t get paid as much as them. After the Hays Code went bye-bye, directors went a little overboard and had women stripping left and right. Foreign films have never been bashful about artful nudity. The naked human body is not some taboo thing unless you have very strict parents or only watch PG-13 blockbusters. On the other hand, this is hardly what I would call artful. This is basically pornographic. The erotic thriller was growing trend in the 1980s and ‘90s, but it was generally in the realm of the auteur—Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers and Crash; Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct and Showgirls; Friedkin’s Cruising and Jade—or relegated to low-budget, direct-to-video efforts. In any case, the scene in question is very gratuitous and I chose to avert my eyes and fast forward through it. I understand the purpose of the scene but thought it was too much.
There are several additional rug-pulling moments, but I won’t spoil them. From this point on, the film kind of shifts its focus to the character of Sergeant Duquette, who immediately suspects that the whole thing was an act. He surveils the suspects when he’s off-duty even though his boss repeatedly tells him the case is closed. In a scene that successfully combines lewdness and humor, Duquette sneaks onto the Van Ryan property where he begins to videotape Suzie and Kelly as they have a conversation near the pool. He is certain that the phone call they make is to Lombardo, which would prove the whole conspiracy, because why would Lombardo be talking on the phone with his accusers? But then the two girls get into a disagreement, one nearly drowns the other, and they end up French kissing in the pool. The shot cuts to reveal Duquette looking at the camera completely baffled.
What sets Wild Things apart from its schlocky contemporaries is its narrative momentum. The audience is always one or two steps behind what they’re seeing, and you’re never given a chance to gather it all before another sucker punch is leveled at you. By the credits, when the missing puzzle pieces are laid out for you to put together, it’s almost incomprehensible how the film so quickly escalated from a sex education seminar to its seafaring coda. Couple that with a really stellar cast2 and it’s a winner. It feels little bit over-gimmicky and reliant on titillation, but it’s simply well constructed from the script and direction side of things.3 It’s pervy trash overlaid on the bones of a competent neo-noir thriller. There are not many people I would feel comfortable watching such a sleazy film with, and watching it alone would feel kind of weird. Here’s to watching erotic thrillers with your spouse, even if it occasionally makes both parties squirm in discomfort.
1. To be fair, while Richards and Campbell both play high school seniors, they were both in their mid-20s when the film was made.
2. Without the cast, Wild Things would not be good. Even the role players are good. But I think Neve Campbell deserves the most reappraisal for her portrayal of the lonely outsider Suzie. She nails all the little mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of her character and for some reason her method of vocal delivery really stood out to me. In one scene, when Suzie calls Duquette and Perez out to her trailer to make her own allegations against Lombardo, they take their time getting there, and Campbell greets them by saying, “Jesus, it took you guys long enough. What if someone was trying to strangle me or… fuck me in the ass, even? I mean… you guys do sex crimes, right?” That moment, vulgar as it is, perfectly captures her performance, and once all of the crazy plot twists play out it makes her performance kind of brilliant I think.
3. I should mention, too, that George S. Clinton’s soundtrack work is solid. I really enjoyed the nice mix of styles, from soft vocal melodies to tasty guitar tones to saxophones.
Sources:
Ebert, Roger. “Wild Things”. RoberEbert.com. 20 March 1998.