'NEVER TALK TO STRANGERS'....UNLESS THEY'RE ON A MOTORCYCLE IN A 90'S SEX THRILLER.....

 Never Talk To Strangers (1995)   Let us now show a moment of remembrance for a genre that flourished through the 1990's......and filled up the shelves of video stores everywhere.

         (And I should know , having toiled as a movie buyer for stores during that era....)

          The 1992 release of Paul Verhoven's violent, hot 'n bothered  "Basic Instinct" opened the floodgates for sexually charged thrillers faster than Sharon Stone infamously opened her underwear-free crotch in that film.  

            Some of the more high profile, A-list heavy breathers (like 'Never Talk To Strangers') made it into theaters but countless others went strait to video, with titles like 'Basic Obsession' or 'Guilty Instinct' or 'Fatal Panties'. 

            The set-up for these films was fairly simple and primal. They either featured a relatively sane man driven into hormonal frenzy by a duplicitous femme fatale.........or a troubled, unsettled woman bubbling up to boil over a vaguely threatening stud...... who may or may not be the neighborhood mad slasher. 

          'Strangers' falls into that latter category, with Rebecca De Mornay as a repressed criminal psychologist who slowly but ever so surely unthaws for the smoldering, aggressive stranger (Antonio Banderas who....uh.....inserts himself, so to speak, into every aspect of her...uh....life. 

            Goes without saying that this unlikely blossoming hothouse relationship doesn't sit well with Rebecca's jovial apartment house neighbor (comedian Dennis Miller) who's been nursing the hots for her.....

            And since we're talkin' thriller here, the fun starts with Rebecca heating up the sheets with Antonio, while an unknown stalker commences terrorizing her. After the usual traditional stalker present of dead flowers, the sick-sick-sicko graduates to more grisly stuff designed to send her over the edge. 

            But who's the cuckoo-for-cocoa-puffs psycho who's got De Hots for De Mornay?  The already shady suspicious Antonio? The wisecracking Miller?   Norman Bates, maybe? Or Hannibal Lector?

          No, no no, BQ will never tell.  I wouldn't dare reveal the film's BIG REVEAL, a  literally bonkers, you-gotta-be-shittin' me wrap up that leaves no perversion untouched but does leave a floor littered with dead bodies.......

           De Mornay, who co-produced the film, gives it her full hysteria-ridden attention and Banderas rides the hell out of a motorcycle and sends Rebecca's temperature up way higher than COVID readings.....simply all that's really required of him. 

           If you're a completist for these kind of films, by all means give it a one time viewing. One couldn't ask for a more prime example of a genre that once ruled the multiplexes, but now mostly resides on Netflix. 3 sweaty stars....(***).