So Criterion has an “erotic thrillers” category this month, which my wife positively jumped on. The first one on the list we hadn’t seen was this one from Ken Russell, whom you will remember as the director of The Lair of the White Worm, a basically bonkers horror/fantasy movie.

And to the extent that this is an erotic thriller at all — a characterization that I’m tbh dubious about on both fronts — this is a basically bonkers erotic thriller.

I like to go into movies knowing absolutely nothing about them, and then my medium face blindness means that I often don’t recognize the stars unless they’re super-recognizable. So as this movie starts, it’s jumping through multiple unrelated scenes with seemingly-unrelated characters, and I didn’t know which ones were Kathleen Turner or Anthony Perkins, and it was just an almost surreal experience of these super-weird smutty-arthouse scenes, one after another, each weirder than the last.

I was actually wondering if it was going to be one of those movies like Daisies or Mirror that doesn’t even aim for narrative coherence, but no: It just takes a bit for it all to become clear how these characters inter-relate and come together.

But… even at that point, it’s still weird as hell. Mostly, it’s not a thriller at all: Throughout most of the movie, there’s no real action, very little detective work (one apparent mystery gets solved quickly and off-screen), and not much danger. It’s kind of just a character development piece, about how people think of sex (about which it’s shockingly direct) and relationships.

But then when the thrillery/killery part of it does come into play, it’s also completely wild and over the top. It’s vaguely reminiscent of early Cronenberg, but what it really reminds me of is a Joe-Bob movie. This is 100% the kind of unique, weird ’80s sex-and-violence thing that he would feature. Recommended if that seems like the kind of thing that you would like.