Bringing back the erotic thriller is only fair
The recent explosion of films featuring rickety old beefcakes doing their best to revive their past glories – think Die Hard 4.0, Rocky Balboa, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull – was all well and good, but it quite clearly favoured male actors.
Where are the female stars making belated sequels to their biggest hits? Where's Geena Davis in Thelma & Louise 2 (we never saw them actually die, after all)? Where's Sally Field in Steel Magnolias 2: Steelier Magnolias? Where's Bridget Fonda in Single White and Conspicuously Older Female?
Well, hold your horses, because a wave of belated female-led movie sequels might just be on the horizon. And it's coming from the most obviously feminist-friendly genre of them all – the erotic thriller. 2006's Basic Instinct 2: Risk Addiction might have been a bit of a failed experiment; in retrospect, asking Stan Collymore to simulate a sex act and setting the entire movie inside a building that's shaped exactly like an erect penis might have been overegging it slightly. But that hasn't stopped Rena Riffel from signing up to reprise her role as Hope in the just-announced Showgirls 2: The Story of Hope.
If Showgirls 2 turns out to be a success – even an ironic one, which seems to be the most likely outcome judging by the gormless website – then it's only going to be a matter of time before other middle-aged female actors start putting their names to new erotic thriller sequels. And, personally, I don't think that can come a moment too soon.
Imagine it. Cindy Crawford coming out of retirement to disrobe for Fair Game 2. Or Madonna signing up for another Body of Evidence which, given that Body of Evidence was a shameless Basic Instinct rip-off, would probably be called Body of Evidence 2: Risk Addiction and feature Stan Collymore simulating a sex act inside a building that's shaped exactly like an erect penis. And who hasn't dreamed of a Bound 2 depicting nothing but Jennifer Tilly and Gina Gershon doing the sort of things middle-aged lesbians might do, like buying dogs and enrolling on dreamcatcher-making workshops? I know I have.
I want all the old erotic thriller actors from the 1980s and 1990s to make comebacks. I want to see 55-year-old Kathleen Turner writhing on top of a terrified man in the middle of a Body Heat follow-up. I want to see mother-of-two Denise Richards romp around cluelessly like the world's oldest schoolgirl in a sequel to Wild Things. I want to see The Colour of Night 2. Actually, I don't want to see The Colour of Night 2. Nobody wants to see that.
What's more, all the female actors participating in these belated erotic thriller sequels would receive an immediate career boost from it, especially from the generation of men who furtively idolised them all so much as schoolboys. Plus, is there a better way for these actors to kick out at modern society's obsession with youth and beauty than by whipping their pants off and humping a dodgy copper in slow motion to some bad saxophone music? No, of course there isn't.
Source: Guardian Online