Contents

04 Cast

07 Crew

09 Let’s Twist Again: Sex, Murder and the

Late 20th Century Hollywood Thriller (2021)
by Anne Billson

31 Shadows in the Sunshine:

Wild Things and Florida Noir (2021)
by Sean Hogan

55 About the Transfer

56 Production Credits

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Wild Things
Original Release Date: 20 March 1998

Cast
Kevin Bacon Sergeant Ray Duquette
Matt Dillon Sam Lombardo
Neve Campbell Suzie Toller
Denise Richards Kelly Van Ryan
Bill Murray Kenneth Bowden
Sandra Van Ryan Theresa Russell
Daphne Rubin-Vega Detective Gloria Perez
Carrie Snodgress Ruby
Robert Wagner Tom Baxter
Jeff Perry Bryce Hunter

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Crew
Directed by John McNaughton
Written by Stephen Peters
Produced by Rodney M. Liber and Steven A. Jones
Edited by Elena Maganini
Director of Photography Jeffrey L. Kimball (ASC)
Music by George S. Clinton
Executive Music Producer Budd Carr

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let’s Twist Again :
sex, murder and the late 20th
Century hollywood Thriller
by Anne Billson

“People aren’t always what they appear to be,” says one of the detectives
in Wild Things. And later on, another detective says: “There’s more to this
story than you know.” You can say that again. In the world of preposterous
plot twists, Wild Things stakes a claim to being queen. Which is why, if
you haven’t yet seen John McNaughton’s film, you would be best advised
to stop reading now and come back later. Because there will be spoilers.

Stephen Peters’ screenplay was originally known as Sex Crimes, a title

retained in French-speaking territories, and almost too on the nose: the
film is chock-a-block with people looking sexy or having sex in between
conspiring to murder one another. It was released in 1998 to a wave
of bemusement from mainstream critics, who described it as tawdry,
vulgar and trashy while shamefacedly confessing they had also found it
indecently entertaining, as though something so tawdry, vulgar and trashy
had no right to be this much fun.

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The fun stems from the way Wild Things subverts expectations. It presents The anti-heroine of Wild Things, like Matty, is playing a long game – though
itself as one genre before slipping into another and then, finally, whipping we only discover this in a series of flashbacks during the end credits,
off the mask to reveal itself as something else again – much like several of which fill in some of the literal black holes in the plot. The film, too, is
the characters. In 1998, it sat at the point at which three tendencies of the playing a long game. For the first act, it sets itself up as a slick and sleazy
1980s and 1990s intersected – erotic thriller, neo-noir, and preposterous melodrama, with the camera ogling twentysomething actresses playing
plot twists – and turned the dial up to eleven on all of them. In a sense it high-school girls in crop-tops and cut-offs. All this is thrown for a loop
was the last hurrah of the erotic thriller as mainstream money-spinner; the when spoiled rich girl Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards), soon after flirting
subgenre would hence become a playground for auteurs (Stanley Kubrick’s outrageously with her school counsellor Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon),
Eyes Wide Shut [1999], David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive [2001], Brian De accuses him of rape.
Palma’s Femme Fatale [2002], Jane Campion’s In the Cut [2003]) before
box-offices succumbed to a rising tide of superhero movies in which sex This is where the first of the black holes comes in; the film cuts away
is conspicuous by its absence. from the incident itself, so we don’t know who to believe. The case against
Sam solidifies when he is accused of rape by a second girl, Suzie Toller
Ground zero of the erotic-noir-preposterous triple-threat is surely Body
Heat (1981), directing debut of Lawrence Kasdan, hot off his screenplays
for The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981).
Body Heat, like Wild Things, is set in Florida and squeezes sensuous capital
out of the state’s steamy climate, ambience of overripe corruption and
nouveau riche decadence. Kasdan deliberately modelled it on classic films
noirs, in particular Double Indemnity (Billy Wilder, 1944). Matty Walker
(Kathleen Turner) is a married woman who introduces herself to feckless
lawyer Ned Racine (William Hurt) with the prescient words, “You’re not too
bright, are you. I like that in a man.” It’s the opening shot in her scheme
to persuade him to murder her rich husband. While the classic noirs were
shaped if not hobbled by the MPA Production Code, by the time Kasdan
made Body Heat he could show Ned in explicit sexual thrall to Matty, as
well as let her get away with murder, leaving Ned to take the rap and
belatedly discover he was never anything other than the fall guy in her
long-gestating masterplan.

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(Neve Campbell) – dope-addled trailer trash with dyed hair and chipped
nail varnish. The introduction of Bill Murray as Ken Bowden, Sam’s street-
smart but not entirely trustworthy lawyer (he’s wearing a neck brace as
part of an insurance fiddle) adds comic relief, but also muddies the waters.

The rape case collapses in court, and Kelly’s mother (Theresa Russell)
is forced to pay Sam eight and a half million dollars for damages and
defamation. But then the first of the really big twists is sprung around
the one-hour mark, when Sam is joined in his motel room by both Kelly
and Suzie. The three of them were in cahoots to plunder Kelly’s hitherto
inaccessible trust fund! They celebrate their success with a three-way
sex romp.

The same year as Body Heat, Bob Rafelson’s 1981 version of The Postman
Always Rings Twice, adapted by David Mamet from James M. Cain’s novel,
also revisited the classic noir set-up of sexy lovers conspiring to murder
the woman’s husband. In tune with the times, Rafelson’s film replaces
the smoldering glances of Tay Garnett’s 1946 adaptation with kitchen
table copulation.

Postman and Body Heat were in the vanguard of a vogue for erotic
thrillers trading on the dubious frisson of copulation with someone who
might be plotting to murder you. For the next two decades, a series of
hapless male stooges were lured into sticky webs of blackmail, murder,
and bunny-boiling by sexually available women in films like Body Double
(Brian De Palma, 1984), Fatal Attraction (Adrian Lyne, 1987), Sea of Love
(Harold Becker, 1989), Final Analysis (Phil Joanou, 1992), Basic Instinct
(Paul Verhoeven, 1992), Color of Night (Richard Rush, 1994), Jade (William
Friedkin, 1995) and so forth, not counting low budget straight-to-video

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variations. More rarely it would be a woman lured into a relationship with Equally prevalent was the “reality is a construct” twist, pioneered not just
an “homme fatale”: Jagged Edge (Richard Marquand, 1985), Masquerade by Philip K. Dick novels such as Ubik (1969) or Time Out of Joint (1959)
(Bob Swaim, 1988), Whispers in the Dark (Christopher Crowe, 1992) and and echoed in Dark City (Alex Proyas, 1998), The Game (David Fincher,
Guilty as Sin (Sidney Lumet, 1993). 1997), The Matrix (the Wachowskis, 1999), The Truman Show (Peter
Weir, 1998) and Shutter Island (Martin Scorsese, 2010), but by works of
But with the sexy threeway in Sam’s motel room, Wild Things has only
just got started. In the 1990s, the preposterous plot twist became a sine
qua non of thrillers, science fiction and horror. Some twists are rooted
in classic literature. Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge” (from 1890, filmed in 1962 by Robert Enrico) was the mother
of all the “they were dead all along” reveals featured in Carnival of Souls
(Herk Harvey, 1962), Jacob’s Ladder (Adrian Lyne, 1990) and The Sixth
Sense (M. Night Shyamalan, 1999). James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs
and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824), Robert Louis Stevenson’s
Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Edgar Allan Poe’s short
story “William Wilson” (1839) are all antecedents of doppelgangers or
alter egos (extra points if the alter ego dresses in drag) in Psycho (1960),
Dressed to Kill (1980), or Fight Club (1999).

Other twists take their cue from detective stories with “unguessable”
endings. Agatha Christie novels, in particular, provide blueprints for many
of the switchbacks that would later become popular in filmed thrillers: the
narrator or protagonist turning out to be the murderer, the murderer faking
their own death, or all the suspects being guilty en masse. Another regular
feature of the filmed thriller is an evil masterplan (often explained in the non-fiction such as David Maurer’s 1940 study of confidence tricksters,
final reel) so ridiculously elaborate it would require a lifetime of planning The Big Con, inspiration for The Sting (George Roy Hill, 1973) and David
and so much effort, which makes you wonder why the perps don’t just Mamet’s confidence trickster yarns. The convoluted schemes of criminal
apply their talents to less risky money-making pursuits, such as banking masterminds are, in effect, carefully constructed alternate realities in
or politics. Maybe it’s the risk that they crave. which the other characters unwittingly play the roles assigned to them.

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to another flurry of plot reversals, including the murders of Suzie and Kelly,
and the revelation that Ray has been in league with Sam all along. The
finale plays out on a yacht in the Caribbean. Ray is killed by Suzie, who,
it turns out, faked her own death and has been conspiring with Sam. But
Sam is just the fall guy; Suzie easily gets the better of him and sails off
into the sunset alone, though not before collecting her loot from crooked
lawyer Ken.

“Who wins?” said director John McNaughton. “The girl from the trailer
park! She’s all alone on the ninety foot sailboat, out on the Caribbean. Pretty
much everyone else is dead.”1 With her grungy goth looks and humble
origins a contrast to the moneyed Florida lifestyle we see elsewhere, Suzie
encourages everyone to underestimate her, though sharp-eyed viewers
who spot her reading Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Death on the Instalment
Plan (“He had a pretty good line on what cheap fucks people are”) may
guess there is more to her than meets the eye.

Much of the pleasure in rewatching a film like Wild Things comes from
realizing that some of the bad acting was deliberate, and trying to work
out which characters are privy to what information at any given time. Of
And just as The Usual Suspects (Bryan Singer, 1995) doubles back on itself course, further viewings also reveal plot holes and implausibility. There’s
to deconstruct the art of storytelling, thrillers like Wild Things unmask the an out of focus shot from Suzie’s point of view, just prior to her supposed
thriller plot as an arrangement of smoke and mirrors, a magician’s sleight of murder, indicating she is drunk and vulnerable. In the reveal during the
hand to misdirect and sometimes even cheat the audience. end credits, though, we’re led to believe she was sober enough to almost
immediately join with Sam in faking her own death. There’s no one else in
While the conspirators in Wild Things are trying to stab each other in the the frame, so who is the out of focus shot supposed to fool? With a sinking
back, corrupt cop Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) is sowing distrust, leading feeling, we realize it’s us. Suzie has been conspiring with the film itself to

1
Interview with John McNaughton, first published in an edited version in the Dutch magazine Schokkend Nieuws and later published
online in The Flashback Files [accessed 16 Sept 2021]. https://www.flashbackfiles.com/john-mcnaughton-interview.

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pull the wool over our eyes. In the preposterous thriller, the ultimate fall
guy is not one of the characters, but the audience.

Women can and do take pleasure in watching the femme fatale at work,
but she is still an archetype invented by men, embodying the idea of
the sexually active female as temptation incarnate, the opposite of the
wholesome wife and mother. And only male filmmakers, one suspects,
could have cooked up a scenario pivoting on two false rape accusations,
vanishingly rare in real life, but perennially cited by men’s rights groups as
justification for disbelieving allegations of sexual assault. If the comeback
of the erotic thriller subgenre is long overdue, what form might it take in
a post #MeToo era?

Perhaps a revival could build on the lateral thinking of promising one-offs

that skew the neo-noir formula towards the female point of view: Black
Widow (Bob Rafelson, 1987), in which a female investigator tracks down
a glamorous female serial killer, The Last Seduction (John Dahl, 1994), in
which the viewer is privy to the femme fatale’s sociopathic schemes, or
Bound (the Wachowskis, 1996), in which two lesbians conspire to steal
from a crooked boyfriend. And if it’s time for the femme fatale to make a
comeback, it might be refreshing and enlightening to look at her through
the eyes of female filmmakers.

Wild Things begat a mini-franchise, in which the sequels only highlighted

what McNaughton and his and crew got right, starting with famous actors
playing around with their screen personas, as opposed to interchangeable
TV actors going through the motions of a daytime soap, and clearly having a
ball with the preposterous twists and turns of the plot as opposed to cynically
recycling them to diminishing returns. False rape allegations, faked deaths
and conspiracy sex abound, with ever more exposition shoehorned into the

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final credits. The series petered out with the straight-to-DVD Wild Things:
Foursome (2010). Perhaps symptomatically, it’s the first entry in which the
criminal mastermind turns out to be a man. An erotic thriller without a
femme fatale at the helm is like a car without an engine.
Anne Billson is a novelist, film critic, screenwriter and photographer. Her horror novels include Suckers, The Ex and The Coming
Thing; non-fiction books include monographs on John Carpenter’s The Thing and Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, Billson
Film Database and Cats on Film. She lives in Belgium.

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shadows in the sunshine:
Wild Things and florida noir
by Sean Hogan

Florida. Third-most populous state in America, and its fourth-largest

economy. And where there are people and money, there is always crime.
Noir writers such as John D. MacDonald and Charles Willeford were the
first to see what was coming, charting Florida’s transformation from – as
The Atlantic magazine put it, in a profile on Willeford – ‘vacationer and
retiree haven to the nation’s capital of glamour, drugs and weird crime.’2

For Hollywood, the drugs and the weird crime would come later. What
the Sunshine State initially promised was glamour, and they don’t come
much more glamorous than the pairing of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren
Bacall. John Huston’s Key Largo (1948) signaled the beginning of Florida
noir, while also gesturing towards the moral enervation that would come
to pervade the sub-genre. Protagonist Frank McCloud is another Bogartian
world-weary tough guy who won’t stick their neck out for nobody, but

2
Fisher, Marshall John, ‘The Unlikely Father of Miami Crime Fiction’, The Atlantic, May 2000.

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is eventually forced out of his isolationism by a suppressed sense of
duty and the love of a good woman. In Key Largo, McCloud’s nemesis
is the sadistic gangster Johnny Rocco (Edward G. Robinson), previously
exiled from the country but now plotting his return. (This establishes one
of the main preoccupations of Florida noir: the notion of the state being
a gateway for corruption, allowing all manner of illicit substances and
personae to enter the country and infect the body politic.) While McCloud
has the foresight to recognize that Rocco is merely a symptom of a more
widespread disease, the gangster is eventually banished back out to sea
and killed. America is safe for now and Bogart heads back into port with a
wry smile; a triumphant closing shot that would habitually be inverted by
many of the more downbeat films that followed.

If Key Largo already anticipated the end of the heroic phase of Florida noir,
then Tony Rome (1967) and its 1968 sequel Lady in Cement are less an
ending than a prolonged death rattle. Frank Sinatra plays Rome’s titular
private eye, whose main preoccupations (booze, broads, gambling) closely
mirror the actor’s own, and who seems as little invested with his caseload
as Sinatra does in his performance. The two films are basically Bondian
larks, their interest in their Florida setting barely extending beyond ogling
bikini babes. (Tony Rome’s artistic ambitions can perhaps best be summed
up by the recurring gag that bookends the film: a woman bends over and
Sinatra’s POV zooms in on her ass, accompanied by a bass drum kick.)

A far more interesting portrayal of the Floridian private eye can be found
in Darker Than Amber (1970), Robert Clouse’s adaptation of the seventh
book in John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee series. On the face of it, Tony
Rome and Travis McGee seem to have much in common, both being idle
but good-natured sea dogs who seem only to stumble into the business
of crime-solving when the plot demands it. But while Marvin Albert’s

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Tony Rome novels actually predate MacDonald’s, it is McGee that has William Smith), their bloody mano-a-mano confrontation making the
proven to be the more enduring creation, and Darker Than Amber does brawls in Tony Rome look like the feeble playfights they are. (One likes
much to suggest why. to imagine that Rome might already have crossed paths with Smith, with
undoubtedly fatal results for the playboy P.I.) At the film’s close, in what
As portrayed by Rod Taylor, McGee is tanned and ruggedly handsome, the will become a common inversion of Key Largo’s final shot, McGee is left
tarnished-but-not-dirty white knight recognizable from a thousand noirs. staring disconsolately out to sea, wondering what might have been.
One might expect the character to be as smugly insouciant as Tony Rome;
certainly the beefy Taylor looks far more convincing throwing a punch If Darker Than Amber suggested that the noir hero’s days were already
than the diminutive, middle-aged Sinatra. But there is a lurking disquiet drawing to a close, Arthur Penn’s Night Moves (1975) takes him all the
to McGee, as if he can perceive the darkness gathering in Florida’s future. way to the end of the line. The masterpiece of Florida noir, Penn’s film was
The film begins conventionally enough with McGee trying to help a girl in birthed out of the creeping paranoia of the early 1970s, and concerns Harry
trouble, only for the investigator to promptly discover he is quite powerless Moseby, an ineffectual private eye whose attempts to trace a missing girl
to save her. Indeed, by Darker Than Amber’s climax, McGee is barely able lead him to stumble blindly into a labyrinthine plot of sex, lies, betrayal and
to save himself from the film’s psychotic antagonist (a genuinely terrifying murder. Moseby seeks to emulate the classic noir hero, only to find himself

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overwhelmed by the sheer corruption of modern society; indeed, he is into a sort of spiritual gangrene. There is no place for the likes of a Travis
barely cognizant of how deep the rot goes. (As Moseby comments during McGee or even a Harry Moseby in the world of Scarface, a realm inhabited
the film, ‘He never saw it coming.’) At Night Moves’ climax, the private eye only by monsters preying on other monsters. De Palma’s film may lack
is left, not merely staring out to sea, but stranded upon it; bereft, wounded, the sort of deft character shading found in Night Moves, but cocaine isn’t
and hardly able to comprehend how he got there. a subtle drug, and neither are the people who take it. What Scarface
demonstrates is just how little value the individual actually possesses in
Harry Moseby might not have been much of a hero, but at least he was an age of vicious individualism run amuck.
striving to be one. By the time Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat opened in
1981, Florida noir no longer had any use for white knights. In Body Heat,
everyone is dirty; even Floridian law enforcement barely seem to care
that their shyster lawyer pal William Hurt killed his lover Kathleen Turner’s
husband. After all, he did it for the love of a beautiful woman, and the
husband was a bad guy anyway, so the prospect of arresting Hurt for the
murder seems more like an annoying technicality than a moral imperative.
Often derided as an empty pastiche of noir classic Double Indemnity, with
the benefit of 40 years of hindsight, Body Heat now looks increasingly
impressive; its combination of perfectly cast movie star glamour and
snappy dialogue symptomatic of a type of movie that latterly seems to
have vanished forever. (To get a sense of just how well Kasdan’s film works,
contrast it with a later Florida noir: China Moon, a 1994 Body Heat retread
that, despite a similarly good cast, never rises beyond rote imitation.) And
once again, we conclude with one of the main characters gazing wistfully
out to sea; mourning the choices they’ve made, mourning a time and a
place that will soon be lost forever.

Just how lost would become apparent in Brian De Palma’s satirical 1983
ode to Reaganite excess, Scarface. In its account of the rise and fall of a
sociopathic Cuban hood, De Palma’s movie shows us a Florida that has
finally abandoned all sense of moral or ethical reason; under the influence
of the cocaine trade, the petty corruption of Body Heat has now ballooned

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Miami Blues, the 1990 adaptation of Charles Willeford’s novel, shows us The Blackout (1997) at least has the decency to take his own life when
exactly what happens when the old-time noir hero encounters this new forced to confront his own sins; the sub-genre’s typical closing image
breed of Reaganite sociopath. Amiable doofus cop Hoke Moseley loses being further inverted as the stricken man not just stares out to sea, but
his badge, gun, and false teeth to Alec Baldwin’s grinning psychopath throws himself into the ocean to drown. The Blackout is a druggy ramble,
Frenger Junior, and spends the rest of the film trying to get them back. and scarcely any more coherent than Ferrara’s disowned 1989 Florida noir
Moseley isn’t fighting for a better world, or even to save a girl in trouble; Cat Chaser, but it is yet another signifier of the moral bankruptcy to come.
he just resents being made to look like a schmuck. His eventual triumph
has less to do with diligent police work or his own heroism than the self- Blood and Wine (1996) is another post-Reagan essay in greed. (‘This is
destructive mania that ultimately consumes Frenger, just as it did Tony a thousand points of light’, one character says of the priceless diamond
Montana. In a society as debased as modern-day Florida, we can no longer necklace that serves as the film’s MacGuffin, in a pointed reference to
rely on heroes to save us; we can only hope that these utterly corrupt men George H.W. Bush’s oft-quoted 1988 speech.) But while old hands Jack
and women doom themselves. The scumbag protagonist of Abel Ferrara’s Nicholson and Michael Caine are superbly reptilian as the two central

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conspirators (one particularly squirm-inducing scene has Nicholson longer and harder than their more privileged cohorts. Much like De Palma’s
groping in his dying wife’s underwear for the missing necklace), Blood Scarface, Wild Things seems to have thrown up its hands and given up
and Wine makes the cardinal error of believing that its audience will need entirely on subtlety or moral insight, and is none the worse for it.
someone younger and prettier to identify with, and so gives us two bland
time-wasters in the shapes of Stephen Dorff and Jennifer Lopez, who are In a society typified by Tony Montana and the lowlifes of Wild Things,
scarcely any more sympathetic in their naked opportunism than Nicholson it was perhaps inevitable that Florida noir’s trajectory would ultimately
and Caine, and a whole lot less charismatic. lead it towards unbridled nihilism. By the time we reach films such as
Larry Clark’s Bully (2001) and Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers (2012),
Wild Things (1998) makes no such mistakes, however. John McNaughton’s the moral underpinnings of early noir are long gone. Even the ghosts of
film takes things back to noir basics; a tall tale piled high with double morality that haunt such mid-period films as Body Heat or Miami Blues
crosses, multiple femmes fatales, and the hapless male stooges that have long been exorcized. All that’s left is a lost generation that grew
trail in their wake. There is no one to root for here; by the film’s end, up idolizing the moral turpitude of Scarface. Murder is no longer a brutal
the sole surviving character is lent sympathy only by the fact that their means to an end, but something cool you can tell all your friends about.
working-class origins have meant they’ve had to plot, betray and kill a lot This is not to say that the films aren’t effective, in their own way. Both

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suffer from an overly lascivious directorial eye, but their vacant, unblinking
horror does pack a queasily effective gut-punch.

And if the darkness of Florida noir is to be taken as an accurate reflection

of the shadowy underbelly of the locale that spawned it, then the no-
values ideology of Bully and Spring Breakers seems entirely apposite.
The old-world glamour of Key Largo has long since been lost at sea; all
that remains is the same disease Bogart saw coming back in 1948.
Sean Hogan is a UK writer and filmmaker. His feature credits include the films Future Shock! The Story of 2000AD, The
Borderlands, and The Devil’s Business. He has written two award-nominated books of cinema metafiction, England’s Screaming
and Three Mothers, One Father. A third volume in the sequence, Twilight’s Last Screaming, will be published in 2022.

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about the transfer
Wild Things was restored in 4K by Sony Pictures Entertainment.
4K scanning by Colorworks, Culver City from 35mm Original
Picture Negative. Digital Image Restoration by Prasad Corporation,
India and Roundabout Entertainment, Santa Monica. HDR color
grading and conform by colorist David Bernstein at Roundabout
Entertainment in Santa Monica. Audio restoration and conform at
Sony Pictures Entertainment, sourced from the original 35mm 5.1
stereo magnetic tracks. Restoration supervised by Rita Belda for
SPE, with color approval by director John McNaughton.

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Production credits special thanks
Disc and Booklet Produced by Jasper Sharp Alex Agran, Chrystel Alard, Sarah Appleton, Rita Belda,
Executive Producers Kevin Lambert, Francesco Simeoni Anne Billson, Cory Coken, Richard Edwards, Karyn Filek, Jill Fritzo,
Technical Producer James White Jeremy Glassman, Sean Hogan, Steven A. Jones, Ari Karnezis,
Technical Assistant James Pearcey Jim Kunz, John McNaughton, Susan Molino, Michael Varrati.
Disc Production Manager Sigrid Larsen
QC Aidan Doyle and Alan Simmons
Production Assistant Samuel Thiery
Mastering and Subtitling The Engine House Media Services
Artist Sam Hadley
Design Obviously Creative

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