Crimes Of Passion (1984) Always funny what you remember and don't remember......re-visiting this mad, mad, mad mad, orgiastic Ken Russell opus, I'd only remembered Rick Wakeman's insanely catchy theme ("It's a lovely life") that plays incessantly throughout the entire film.
Couldn't believe I didn't remember Kathleen Turner and Anthony Perkins' performances.....both of them fearlessly going way, way, way over the top......as if executing triple somersaults on a 50 foot high wire without a net.....
Turner, at the very height of her hubba-hubba sex bombshell status, ("Body Heat"), plays a woman who's intentionally split her personality without any Jekyll & Hyde potion required. By day she's over-achieving but emotionally remote clothing designer Joanna Crane - all business and by choice, no men in her life. But by night, she's skid-row hooker China Blue, flaunting her spectacularly sculpted body in and out of second-skin dresses. Her specialty - twisted performance art tailored to her customers' kinks with orgasms guaranteed as she plays a beauty queen, a rape victim....and even a rapist herself.
But China has a creepy stalker-fan in panting, drooling street preacher Peter Shayne, played in hilarious fits of total frenzy by Perkins. Dialing up the crazy well into the danger zone, Perkins makes his own Norman Bates seem like portrait of calm and sanity. Rev. Shayne, whose non-stop babbling veers from damning Turner to hell to fondling her legs, considers himself a soulmate kindred spirit to China Blue. He's out to save her soul, even if it might mean using his enormous stainless steel dildo with a sharpened tip. (And no..... I swear I'm not making this up.....)
Barry Sandler's script throws in some editorializing on the sorry state of marital strife in America, mostly due to a mixture of men's sexual immaturity, their miscommunication with their wives, and their locker room obsession with dick jokes. We see this play out through nice guy everyman Bobby Grady (John Laughlin) whose marriage to his disinterested, exhausted wife (Annie Potts) has gone cold.
So my oh my, what a break for Bobby when Joanna's employer hires him to spy on her to see if she's selling off company secrets. The Bobster falls so much head over spiked heels for her, he starts a crack in her invisible protective armor, even possible humanizing her.
Ken Russell, always a lover of depraved spectacle, shows minimal interest in the script's thesis on American sexual mores but when it comes to displaying Turner's China Blue in her full horny splendor, nobody Ken do it like Ken. And when teamed up with the wild-eyed Perkins, Russell delivers the true trip to Crazy Town his movies always promise......
For BQ, the main reason to sit through this spacey oddity, is the dazzling witty rapid fire dialogue Barry Sandler hands Turner and Perkins for their scenes together. What a gift he gave these actors as they spit out Sandler's poison-tipped zingers at each other faster than tracer bullets. I hadn't heard such brilliantly crafted wordplay since Burt Lancaster and Tony Curtis went verbally mano e mano in "Sweet Smell Of Success".
Don't even think for a minute I'm making any great claims of quality to "Crimes Of Passon".....from beginning to end it's a five alarm trainwreck. But I defy anyone to take their eyes off it for a minute. Therefore, as one of the most strangely compelling, watchable trainwrecks BQ has ever laid eyes on.....3 stars (***). For all curators and collectors of lunatic, unhinged cinema......here's a 'don't miss'........
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