Review of Wild Things (1998) by Drew S — 05 Dec 2010

It hurts my brain to think that someone actually wrote this movie. Wild Things' journey from Point A to Point B is so convoluted and messy, it's almost as if some sad screenwriter drew a beginning and ending out of a hat and resolved to connect them with a million other plot points from that same hat in between. The movie is like a hyperactive toddler with a story to tell; you might get the whole story eventually and it'll probably be sort of funny, but it's punctuated in really bizarre places and you eventually start to get fed up and just want to hear the ending. Honestly, by the time I got to the end of this movie, I looked back and thought "what the fuck" to myself and sort of left it on the ground. I mean, there are plot twists DURING AND AFTER THE CREDITS. It's like, come on guys, can we please just call it a night? Wild Things' sheer audacity makes it memorable, at the very least, but more tiring than anything.

That said, though, it's really rather fun in a trashy way. I think the casting absolutely hamstrings it, as Denise Richards and Matt Dillon can really only take you to predictable places, the former as a fake-naive sexpot and the latter as a gruff authoritative sexpot (and Neve Campbell, who I generally like, is pretty awful here). It looks shitty in a way that suggests there wasn't much more on the DP's mind than cramming as much as Denise Richards' naked, writhing body on the screen as often as possible. But hey, if a 27-year-old with fake breasts pretending to be a high schooler does it for you, then by all means. Kevin Bacon's pretty fun, though of course it takes about five thousand plot twists for him to get there. Basically every character in this movie is involved in at least twenty or thirty plot twists so that's not really a spoiler. Honestly, I'm really surprised that there wasn't some ultimate fuck-off "it was all Denise Richards' schizophrenic delusion" plot twist at the end. Thank goodness for small blessings, I suppose.