2022 Entry #013 01-30-22 “Wild Things” is a delightfully trashy 1998 American neo-noir erotic crime thriller film directed by John McNaughton and starring Matt Dillon (“In & Out”), Neve Campbell (“54”, “Three to Tango”, “Intimate Affairs”), Kevin Bacon (“Queens Logic”, “Beauty Shop”), Denise Richards (“Nowhere”), Bill Murray (“Tootsie”, “Groundhog Day”), Theresa Russell (“Black Widow”) & Daphne Rubin-Vega (“Flawless”, “Sex and the City”, “Smash”, “Rent: Live”, “Tales of the City” “tick, tick…BOOM!”). The story is set in south Florida, where a high school counselor (Dillion) is accused of rape by two female students (Campbell & Richards), but the police officers investigating (Bacon & Rubin-Vega) suspect something more is going on.
I’m sure this movie makes a lot of people’s guilty pleasure lists. Most of the characters (like “Basic Instinct”) are horrible people, but they’re so much fun! But why is the movie on this list? Spoilers follow, which frankly, are more fun to discover on your own if you’ve not seen it. But if you don’t care, then feel free to continue.
The film reveals (or at least implies) that Neve Campbell’s character, Suzie Toller, was lovers with Denice Richards’s character, Kelly Van Ryan, before the start of the film…and that she is also (secretly) Kelly’s aunt. The question of if that backstory is true or not is because this a twisty puzzle of a movie and it’s possible that some of that backstory is forged…and yet even if it’s all a lie…there’s more. During the film, Suzie and Kelly have sex, both with Dillon’s Sam Lombardo along as an instigator, and on their own. In addition to that, there’s a subtle homoeroticism between Lombardo and Kevin Bacon’s Sergeant Ray Duquette. In the film, Lombardo calls Duquette a cocksucker and the reaction from the Sergeant is priceless; and maybe it’s just me, but it left me feeling like Duquette has sucked off Lombardo at some point. If that seems too tenuous, there’s a famous scene later in the film where Lombardo returns to his cabin to find Duquette in his shower, with Kevin Bacon going fully frontal, and the two seem totally comfortable with this scenario. Mix this with Bill Murray’s sleazy lawyer character questioning if the student accusing Lombardo is male or female, Lombardo’s deck hands and him later putting Duquette in that role and there’s a lot of suggestion going on.
I read somewhere years ago that the creative team had toyed with making the men lovers but that they felt like that might cross a line, and as much as I would have loved to see it, they were probably right. The LGBTQ audience had started boycotting films that portrayed all the queer characters in movies as murderous, duplicitous monsters…and they may well have skipped this movie if that were the case here. And straight male audiences, tend to not go for gay male movie storylines; the inclusion and upset over minor gay characters in recent animated and comic book based films is unfortunately testament to that. And of course straight men and women generally find bi or lesbian women either titillating or completely non-threatening. Still, this movie felt like something a bit more than the usual girl on girl tease.
Oh. And stick around through the end credits.