In the age of streaming, there’s a widespread belief that every movie is available, all the time, everywhere. Don’t fall for it! Some of the greatest movies ever made are nowhere to be found due to everything from music rights snafus to corporate negligence. In this column, we take a look at films currently out-of-print on physical media and unavailable on any streaming platform in an effort to draw attention to them and say to their rights holders, “Release This!”
There’s been a lot of attention paid to the first 10 or so years of Roger Corman‘s reign as a mentor and producer. From the 1960s to the late ’70s, he financed early films by Martin Scorsese, Peter Bogdanovich, Ron Howard, Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, and other directors who would go on to rule Hollywood for decades. Less investigated is the interesting period that followed Corman’s sale of his New World Pictures (the entity responsible for the likes of 1977’s “Grand Theft Auto” and ’79’s “Rock ‘n’ Roll High School”) and saw the formation of Concorde Pictures.
Concorde was a new entity that followed the same formula as New World — hire talented young filmmakers hungry for a break and give them creative freedom within well-established genres. But Concorde yielded fewer household names among its alumni. This has less to do with a diminishing talent pool than a changing industry where the lines between Corman’s world and Hollywood at large became more sharply drawn.
In the 1970s, a Corman production like Dante’s “Piranha” had a release strategy similar to “Jaws,” the movie that inspired it: a theatrical run followed by ancillary engagements on airplanes, pay TV, network TV, and ultimately home video. By the 1990s, most of Corman’s product saw only a perfunctory theatrical release and mostly went straight to VHS or late-night cable.
As a result, the movies were often seen as even less “legitimate” than the drive-in fare on which Jonathan Demme and Ron Howard cut their teeth. It became rarer for a director to graduate from the Corman school of filmmaking to the big leagues, though it did occasionally happen — Carl Franklin (“Devil in a Blue Dress”) a key example. Yet hiding in plain sight were a number of filmmakers who deserved better careers, or at the very least deserved more credit for the movies they made under Corman: riffs on studio fare made with a fraction of the resources, often smarter and more entertaining than the movies they were ripping off.
Director Kristine Peterson‘s “Body Chemistry” is a case in point. Released in 1990, “Body Chemistry” was one of literally hundreds of erotic thrillers cranked out by Corman and competitors like Axis Films in the wake of “Fatal Attraction” (though the genre’s roots go back a little further to “Play Misty for Me,” “Looking for Mr. Goodbar,” “Cruising,” and Brian De Palma’s suspense movies). Although the genre burned out by the end of the decade, roughly 1988 to 1996 saw a gold rush for independent producers who took advantage of a unique convergence of circumstances to mint money making low-budget versions of the kinds of films the studios were making with stars like Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone.
The first reason for the low-budget erotic thriller’s dominance had to do with Blockbuster Video’s supremacy as the United States’ biggest video store chain. In the 1980s, independent video stores largely stayed in business because they offered something “family” video store Blockbuster didn’t: X-rated material. Yet while Blockbuster wouldn’t rent porn, pretty much anything R-rated (or even unrated) was fair game, a loophole independent producers like Corman seized upon, filling the adult void at Blockbuster’s thousands of stores with softcore, R-rated sex flicks that could pass as “real” movies by virtue of being suspense films with actual plots.
This was a period when VHS was still the dominant home video format, and tapes sold to retail chains for well over 50 bucks a piece on a manufacturing cost of just a few dollars. Combine this with other revenue streams like cable television, where Corman made a fortune thanks to the popularity of softcore erotica on Cinemax and other networks, and the financial rationale for making erotic thrillers en masse becomes obvious. Especially since such films didn’t cost that much to produce, or even produce well.
That’s where the benefit for directors like Peterson came in. Unlike monster movies or action films, which are virtually impossible to make on the same level as the studios without considerable resources, an erotic thriller made for around a million dollars doesn’t look that much different from “Fatal Attraction” or “Body of Evidence.” At least not as different as, say, “Carnosaur” looks from “Jurassic Park.” The erotic thriller doesn’t need much to work: a plot with some kind of suspense or crime element, actors willing to perform semi-graphic sex scenes, and a few locations for them to have sex in.
Inventive filmmakers like Peterson utilized this system to make surprisingly decent movies, films with style and ideas and wit. “Body Chemistry” is one of the best of the 1990s erotic thriller cycle, a movie whose strengths are all the more apparent given how closely it follows the genre’s patient zero, “Fatal Attraction” — it’s in its subtle variations that “Body Chemistry” reveals just what Peterson and screenwriter Jackson Barr (with an uncredited rewrite by Thom Babbes) are up to.
The core premise of “Body Chemistry” is virtually identical to that of “Fatal Attraction” (which itself was a fairly blatant ripoff of Clint Eastwood’s “Play Misty for Me”): married researcher Marc Singer sleeps with colleague Lisa Pescia while his wife is out of town, and when Pescia’s character becomes obsessed with him, he realizes he is in for much more than he bargained for when he went to bed with her. Much like “Fatal Attraction,” “Body Chemistry” spends most of its running time ratcheting up the tension, keeping the viewer in suspense over whether the femme fatale will, at best, expose her lover and ruin his family life — or, at worst, cause him and the family bodily harm.
The differences between Peterson’s film and Lyne’s are emphasis and audience identification. Michael Douglas’ character in “Fatal Attraction” is certainly presented as a moral and even physical coward — right down to the climax, when his wife (Anne Archer), not he, must destroy Glenn Close once and for all. But he’s also consistently implied to be the story’s hero, or at least the person we should be rooting for. In spite of his infidelity, there’s never any real question that the restoration of his nuclear family is the ideal resolution, something Lyne hammers home with blunt obviousness in a final shot that lingers on a family photo. (Though the original, scrapped pre-release ending, where Close’s character commits suicide, leaves the family in much worse and less-Hollywood-friendly shape.)
The balance of power between Singer’s character and Pescia’s in “Body Chemistry” occupies a grayer middle ground than the clearly defined opposition of “Fatal Attraction.” While Pescia is clearly nuts, Singer is just as clearly presented as her doppelgänger, a message underlined by the film’s many shots that implement reflective surfaces. (Those gorgeous surfaces, by the way, are courtesy of “A Complete Unknown” director of photography Phedon Papamichael and his second unit DP Wally Pfister, 10 years away from his collaborations with Christopher Nolan; both men paid their dues in the world of erotic thrillers for years.)
Douglas’ character in “Fatal Attraction” comes across as a sort of innocent throughout that movie, even after his myriad sins; Singer’s sex researcher Tom Redding shows his dark side early on, and it only gets darker, his intensity mirroring Pescia’s as she grows more obsessive. Douglas is presented as a good guy who made a mistake; Singer is immediately established as a man filled with contradictions that proliferate as the film progresses. Tom Redding genuinely loves his family and genuinely loves kinky sex with a coworker and doesn’t think the two are exclusive — he’s stupid, greedy, and tormented, and the film’s tension comes less from our fear of what Pescia will do than our curiosity about how long he can keep doubling down on his denials, both to his wife and himself.
This is a key distinction between “Body Chemistry” and “Fatal Attraction,” and one of the areas where the low-budget knockoff is more interesting than its Academy Award-nominated source: the threat is as internal as it is external. “Fatal Attraction” is about a family under siege by a rampaging outside force — the single career woman — but in “Body Chemistry,” the threat comes from within. Singer keeps returning to Pescia long after he knows how unhinged he is, and his self-destructiveness is to blame for the devastation wrought upon him, his wife, and his son.
Singer and Pescia convey these complexities in performances that astonish in their nuance and complexity. Each plays madness utterly convincingly, with as many notes on the emotional scale as their A-list brethren. They, and the script, follow through on every implication of the movie’s concept, leading to a conclusion very different from the crowd-pleasing denouement in “Fatal Attraction,” but one in its way more honest, and more satisfying.
“Body Chemistry” was one of those too-rare occasions when contemporary critics actually recognized what was going on beneath the B-movie surface; multiple critics, including Kevin Thomas in the Los Angeles Times and Ty Burr in Entertainment Weekly, not only praised it but preferred it to “Fatal Attraction.” Yet the movie, and Peterson, have largely been forgotten. Why?
Availability is certainly part of the problem. Though “Body Chemistry” was ubiquitous on cable television throughout the early 1990s, it’s been out of print on DVD for years and, as of this writing, is unavailable to stream anywhere. (Oddly, its sequels are readily accessible on Tubi along with a gajillion other low-budget erotic thrillers.) This month provides a rare opportunity to see the movie on the big screen at Quentin Tarantino’s New Beverly Cinema, but if you don’t live in Los Angeles, you’re out of luck.
The movie and Peterson deserve better. Peterson only directed a handful of movies, but her debut “Deadly Dreams” is an excellent low-budget horror film, and “Lower Level,” her return to the erotic thriller genre, is, like “Body Chemistry,” an above-average example of its type. There are also pleasures to be had in unpromising assignments like “Critters 3” and “Kickboxer 5” thanks to Peterson’s elegant eye and innate sense of pace. “Body Chemistry” remains her best film, yet it’s the hardest to see — a situation as inexplicable as Tom Redding’s decision to go back for one last tryst even when he should know better.
“Body Chemistry” will screen at the New Beverly Cinema on February 17.
