Kink at Pride: Body of Evidence (Uli Edel, 1993)

When I was in grade school, I used to huddle up and read my way through the Roger Ebert Movie Yearbook. My mom got them every year. I used them to find out the plots of movies she wouldn’t let me watch: The Child’s Play review, which uses the phrase “plants a claw-hammer between her eyebrows,” was especially memorable. I was so entranced by Ebert’s review of Altered States that I re-read it on a regular basis, which is how I became convinced, at age nine, that I needed to get into a sensory deprivation tank so I could witness the anguished birth of the cosmos. (I eventually tried this a couple of years ago. It wasn’t that great. Neither is Altered States, for that matter.)

Which is all to say: One of my formative moviegoing memories — which concerns a movie I never actually watched, until a few weeks ago — is of how much Roger Ebert hated Body of Evidence, which stars Madonna, and I remember this mostly because it introduced to my tender eleven-year-old mind the prospect of somebody being fucked to death. Here’s the Siskel and Ebert episode that opened my eyes (the Body of Evidence segment starts at 7:20, if you want to cut to the chase): 

Ah, the Golden Age of criticism: Gene Siskel sputtering that Madonna is “NOT sexy, she has a DUMB haircut” on national television. (I wouldn’t talk too much about hair if I were you, pal.) 

Anyway: Body of Evidence has been stuck, in my mind, all these years, as the primary example of what a bad erotic thriller looks like. It was hard for me to imagine how that would even work. All of these movies were sleazy and cheesy and sexist and homophobic, they all had boats and gauzy white curtains and soft amber sex lighting and elaborate lingerie, the vibe was always stuck  between the “November Rain” video and some divorced Dad’s sadistic revenge fantasy. What does the bad version of that look like? Now, having watched it, I can finally answer the question: A bad erotic thriller is like a good erotic thriller, only more so.