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Animal Instincts

Animal Instincts

Released Feb 01st, 1993
Running Time 94
Company Academy Home Video
Cast Shannon Whirry, John Saxon, Jan Michael Vincent, David Carradine, Delia Sheppard, Maxwell Caulfield, Mitch Gaylord
Critical Rating AA
Genre Alternative

Rating


Reviews

Credit two factors with the renaissance of the saxophone.

Bill Clinton on Arsenio, is one. But, an even more subtle touch than that is the high profile of alternative adult films being released straight-to-video that have Basic Instinct bedroom scenes and seductive smoky bistro jazz scores.

Animal Instincts is like that with all these lush, melodic, sexual elements at play. Every dramatic point and counterpoint is underscored by a tenor sax. This comes with such regularity that you'd half expect a scene with one of the characters going to the bathroom to wipe their ass to a Charley Parker arrangement. The film definitely puts the sex and the mood in hyperkinetic caricature at times.

The plot is a take on the tabloid-celebrated Kathy Willets story, wherein an everyday housewife, married to a cop, starts hooking on the side and, thus, acquires a roll call of Johns that reads like a who's who of influence peddling.

Shannon Whirry is married to ambitious patrolman Maxwell Caulfield. Whirry has a set of lips that are only matched by her set of boobs. We see both sets in ample abundance throughout the film as Whirry is forever getting undressed and even more forever getting interviewed talking heads-style in tight camera close-ups. There's a little too much of both. Whirry, no matter how sexy-and she is that indeed-is left to carry the main sex load in this opus like a one-woman Times Square peep show. This act gets real stale after awhile.

Problems for Whirry and Caulfield begin when Max' ambitions take their toll in the bedroom. The thrill is gone. However, Caulfield discovers, quite accidentally, that he only gets off by watching his wife having sex with other men, this after he catches her in bed with a TV repairman who looks like a L.A. rock 'n' roll god.

Two of B-moviedom's slimeball-cum-laudes, David Carradine and Jan-Michael Vincent, are perfectly seedy as a strip club owner and politi-can, respectively. Caulfield, who was magnificently psychotic in The Boys Next Door, is too much like an Eagle Scout in this yarn where an occasional flip-out would go a long way to stir the cauldron of monotone illicimess.

The sex and gung-ho nudity makes Animal Instincts a perfectly respectable sleazeoid potboiler. It's graphically intense in the bedroom (hurray), as far as Whirry can take it, but it needs several more female reinforcements to help save the wagon train.



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