Guilty Pleasures (1997) — Triskaidekafiles

GUILTY PLEASURES

WRITERS: Joseph F. Parda and Joseph Zaso

DIRECTORS: Joseph F. Parda and Joseph Zaso

STARRING: Alexandra Paulhiac as Silvia Resino

Joseph Zaso as Philip Dargent

Eraldo Maglara as Jerome Fenner

Hank Poje as Bengal

Ruby Honeycat as Kim

Christopher Hoskin as Rudy D.

Kevin Ratigan as Joe Braygin

Sasha Graham as RoseMarie Curtis

Carl Marchese as Bill Randazzo

Liz Havery as Louise

Charles Struensee as Michael

Johanna Haggerty as Amanda

Ellen Sauchelli as Amy

Joe Marzano as Claude DeCarlo

QUICK CUT: A pair of women deal with everyday life of being women in the big city. I’m sure they’ll be fine.

THE MORGUE

Silvia - A young woman harassed by perverse phone calls, an ex boyfriend, and the police.

Dargent - The cop harassing her. He’s into the obscene phone calls, and can’t let it go. Which is good for the case, but not for their relationship.

RoseMarie - An aspiring actress who has a cheery outlook on life, and is struggling to bring out her tougher side in her acting. She’s also being harassed by someone from her past.

Claude - RoseMarie’s acting coach, and he’s tough on her, pushing her to her limits, and a bit strange beyond that.

Bill - A man who has taken an interest in Rose Marie, even if he reminds her of her father. He’s gentle, polite, and loving, and does his best to protect her.

You shouldn't feel guilty about it, if it's a movie you love.

TRISK ANALYSIS: Welcome back, Triskelions! Hopefully y'all are seeing this review, because I have had a devil of a time getting it done. I won't bore you with the details, and instead just tee up this week's movie, Guilty Pleasures. This is a shot on video flick from the mid to late 90s, that is technically an anthology, but it's really only two stories, and they are my kinda sleazy. Let's get into this.

The movie opens as a clock bell rings, and we watch a bunch of assorted footage, like a black gloved figure setting up a camera, a woman investigating the walls, and a woman coming home and getting comfortable in some frilly unmentionables. She and another woman are quickly dispatched.

And then there is another woman, calling out to demons and vampires and monsters to invade the building. This ultimately has no bearing on the plot of either of the stories I'm about to talk about. See, Guilty Pleasures was an anthology movie, with hopes of being a series of anthologies, all set in this one apartment complex, and this was going to set up future tales of woe. Sadly, that day never came.

Which tees things up for the first actual story, Nocturnal Emissions, as a couple are having a romantic dinner at a restaurant.

Or it would be romantic if Silvia wasn't trying to tell Jerome that it's over. It takes Jerry a little while to take the hint, as they go back and forth with "It's over." "What do you mean?" "It's OVER!" three or four times before it sinks in.

Jerome does not take this well, gets lightly violent with her, and more violent with a water when he breaks a wine bottle over his head.

The cook and wait staff take care of him, and Sylvia sneaks out in all the commotion. Good for her.

Sylvia drops her keys, and when she reaches for them behind the fridge, her arm comes back covered in goo. This was another idea they would have touched on in a later movie. I am genuinely saddened for the lost potential here.

Once she's cleaned up, she slowly gets undressed, and heads to take a bath, before getting an obscene phone call and...ah, I see this is gonna be sleazy sort of movie. Okay.

The lesser known Batman villain, Pornface.

After a random woman gets killed and disposed of, Sylvia meets with her friend to talk about Jerome, and it's little more than an excuse for the director to try and be Michael Bay by spinning the camera a...around the...act...oh I think I'm going to be sick. Getting dizzy...

We then cut to Sylvia's friend doing pinup poses for a lurid photographer, and it's all fun and flirtatious, and I am sure nothing will go wrong.

As the photographer leaves to put away his equipment, he gets a meat cleaver to the guts, adding to the body count. And Kim is next on the killer's list.

Sylvia is then visited by a pair of cops, asking about Kim, and since she was into the adult stuff, they seem very willing to play the blame the victim game.

The conversation turns to the obscene phone calls, and Jerome and how he got violent, so the cops head there to question him, more as a covering their bases kinda thing. Detective Dargent leaves his card with Sylvia and makes it very clear she can call him any time, nudge nudge wink wink.

Our cops find Jerome at home, but he freaks out, and jumps out the fire escape. The cops give chase and...oh dear sweet baby Jebus.

I am dead. I’m done. Nope. I have no words.

Yes, they green screened running. And it looks PAINFULLY awkward. It is one of the most ridiculously pointless attempts at experimentation I've ever seen. And you know that's saying something. I...love the audacity of it.

Phil meets with Sylvia to tell her what happens, after Jerome is hit by the camer...er, by a car. Yeah, that's what they were going for.

He spouts off his beliefs that we all have a darker side, and it's all a question of how much we control this stranger. Oh, and they're all doing this in some scenes from the Italian restaurant.

They chat for a bit, and she has some wine, while Phil asks her about the obscene phone calls. And while she talks, he slips his hand down his pants and jerks off and...Oh this movie is SLEAZY sleazy.

Everyone is certain Jerome was the phone pervert, so they try and move on with their lives. Dargent heads home with Sylvia, they both get naked, and she unplugs the phone, just in case, while they make love.

Phil tries to console her, saying the phone won't hurt her anymore, it's her friend, and here, just let him show her, and...

Folks, I have now seen things done with a phone that are not in the instruction manual.

This goes on for a bit, they lounge around chatting, and Dargent spends most of the time staring at himself in the mirror. And in case you didn't get the point, he tells Sylvia of the Greek myth of Narcissus.

Sylvia checks him out some more, and points out he has a scar under his arm. Her daring to question Phil's perfection sends him into a rage, and oops, he's actually the killer that's been going around, completely unrelated to the midnight caller, OR Jerome.

The obscene phone caller rings up, and he overhears Phil confessing, so he hurries over when he realises Sylvia is in danger. He busts in, and shoots the unsuspecting cop.

Is this the end of Millhouse? Is this what it sounds like, when dove's cry?

Sylvia is not grateful for her rescue, as she recognises her saviour's voice as her phone calling friend, and as she screams, we fade into the second story, Method to the Madness.

This story centers around RoseMarie, a struggling actress, who tends to be soft spoken, and tries to stick to the background. She's trying to be noticed, but she has a ways to go yet.

She enrolls in, and is accepted into, the acting class of Claude DeCarlo, a famous, and infamous, acting coach. He's known for being tough, but he gets results. He was the Gordon Ramsay of actors in his day.

We then get a brief interlude of a mad cackling woman, who takes out her anger issues on headshots of RoseMarie.

This looks like something straight out of The Ring.

That gets followed up with a nightmare? of this woman, Monica, being tormented and beaten by her mother, mostly with thorny roses.

At her day job, RoseMarie receives a letter from Monica, saying they should bury the hatchet. Any other time, that wouldn't sound ominous, but here we are.

One of her coworkers, Bill, asks her out to lunch to get to know her, and the two of them chat for a bit. It's going well, and RoseMarie mentions, that he reminds her, of her father! Oooh ouch.

We then get some scenes of Claude's method acting classes, and those go on for awhile.

The big thing that happens here is we learn that Monica is someone RoseMarie knew when she was younger, and something happened between them that drove her away to New York.

We then jump to another scene of Monica hating on photographs, followed by a scene of motherly abuse. So I see the pattern of the storytelling now.

RoseMarie goes for a walk in the park, and runs into Monica, who stays far away, lurking, but watching and just being a vaguely unsettling presence.

...You know, I wasn't intending to make three Ring references in this review, but what are ya gonna do?

Claude has RoseMarie on a bunch of pills, and a special diet, and it slowly takes it's toll. And his pushing her in acting class isn't helping. It all culminates when she acts so hard her nose starts to bleed.

RoseMarie heads home and finds roses everywhere, and messages from Monica, threatening her. The girl runs out of her apartment in a panic, and eventually runs into Bill. She tells him all about Monica, or as much as she can.

She doesn't want to go home, not feeling safe there, so Bill offers her a spot on his couch, which is sure to make his girlfriend happy.

RoseMarie still can't sleep though, and finds the front door open in the middle of the night, as Monica's voice taunts her from the darkness.

We find out that Monica's mom might be an old actress who fell on hard times, and took it out on her kid for her failed dreams. Cool motive, still murder.

But the night of RoseMarie's big play finally comes, and it builds until RoseMarie thinks she sees her dad, and starts hugging one of the actors, who is VERY confused in all this.

RoseMarie is going around the bend, and she ends up stabbing her fellow actor right in the dick, and oh, surprise! She's actually Monica!

To keep a long story from getting any longer, Monica is her real name, but after she murdered her mother, she started a new life as RoseMarie, the name her father wanted to call her. She buried her memories of Monica, and became someone else. Or something like that.

Bill confronts her backstage, but he finds Monica instead. She clobbers him over the head, and chains him up in a basement.

RoseMonica monologues for a bit, giving all her backstory, until she dumps his girlfriend's corpse on the ground. She's just about to kill Bill, when her mother's voice calls her to the roof.

The memory of her mother, or her own failing sanity, causes RoseMonica to fall off the ledge, and go splat on the ground below.

TRISK ASSESSMENT

Video: It’s rough, being shot on video, but it’s on the high end of that. It adds to the sleaziness. It’s a feature, not a bug.

Audio: Adequate.

Sound Bite: “If you're a Scorpio, watch your ass!"

Body Count: I wish there was a little more here, but it’s a decent amount.

1 - About four minutes in, and a woman gets strangled

2 - Another shortly follows in a tub

3 - It's implied the woman calling the demons is killed.

4 - A stranger gets stabbed by a gloved figure.

5 - A photographer is killed

6 - His subject gets knifed in the head

7 - Jerome is hit by a flash of light...er, car.

8 - Dargent is shot by the phone pervert.

9 - RoseMarie stabs a fellow actor in the dick

10 - A flashback to Monica killing mother

11 - RoseMonica kills Amy off screen

Best Corpse: I’m gonna go for two. The model’s death is well done with the knife to the head, and c’mon, getting knifed in the dick is a rough way to go, even if we don’t REALLY see anything.

Blood Type - C: There’s not a lot of effects here, but the ones we do see, are done well enough.

Sex Appeal: I would direct your attention back to “phone sex”.

Drink Up! Every time you feel the need to shower.

Movie Review: This was surprisingly enjoyable. Yes, it’s sleazy, but it’s that right side of sleazy. Well…okay, the phone sex is a BIT much, but other than that… The acting actually has a few highlights to it, the movie has a sense of humour to it, and the subject matter suits the griminess. It’s creative, it tries a few different things, and was actually a good time, if you like this sort of thing. Four out of five phone calls.

Entertainment Value: I love that this movie tries random shit, like the foot chase against blue screen, and wish it leaned more into that stuff. And while the acting is better than expected, they’re also not afraid to chew the scenery at the same time. The second story is a little long, and could have been a movie in its own right, but it was still never boring. Four out of five bloody knives.