The year was 1996. The tragedies of the Branch Davidian Massacre and the Oklahoma City Bombing were behind us, and the country was entering a new age of prosperity. For the fifth straight year, the economy continued to grow; the Nintendo 64 was released; the Unabomber was finally captured; and America was ready to be horny again. We had, after all, finally entered the great Age of the Erotic Thriller. While the subgenre had been cutting its teeth since the late 80s on stuff like TWO MOON JUNCTION and THE RED SHOE DIARIES, it finally came of age in the mid-90s and exploded into the mainstream. The one-two punch of 1992’s BASIC INSTINCT and 1994’s DISCLOSURE had given an eager nation the idea that a sentient piece of white toast like Michael Douglas could hook up with Sharon Stone or Demi Moore, while SHOWGIRLS taught us all that it was possible to leer and laugh at the same time. While skin was big box office in the randiest decade since the 70s, it was even bigger television, and while A-listers were taking it off on the big screen, their b-list counterparts were (literally) climbing on top of one another for the same opportunity to find relevance on the small screen. Thanks to the rise of Cinemax’s so-called “late night programming block” (come on, we all know it as Skinemax) and the direct-to-video market, there was no longer any stigma in revitalizing your career by taking it off on TV. Among those eager to find a second life was a young actress named Alyssa Milano. Years removed from her success on WHO’S THE BOSS, she was ready to show the world that she was more than just little Samantha Micelli, a process that she’d begun portraying Amy Fisher in the sensational made-for-TV movie LONG ISLAND LOLITA.
Playing a homicidal sexpot on prime-time was but a stepping stone towards Milano’s real goal, though—the total redefinition of herself as a fully sexual, adult woman—not America’s girl-next-door. She found the creative partner she was looking for in the form of Anne Goursaud, an editor-turned-director who’d made her career working with Francis Ford Coppola on THE OUTSIDERS, ONE FROM THE HEART, and DRACULA. Goursaud herself was something of the opposite of Milano— a woman pointedly without an agenda. After she was asked to direct an episode of Cinemax’s Red Shoe Diaries based solely on the fact she knew how to operate a camera and held a French passport, she found herself—as she told Linda Ruth Williams in her seminal text The Erotic Thriller in Contemporary Cinema—as the “hired gun of the erotic thriller world.” Not wanting to turn down a paycheck, Goursaud—who had no particular interest in the subgenre—decided to take the opportunity to apply the feminine gaze to a nominally male-directed field. It was the perfect match: a director with no real vision and a visionary with no directorial skill working together to revolutionize an entire cinematic form. Their first collaboration was the stuff of teen 90s lore: EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE, a movie that skirted the boundaries of the erotic horror film and veered into softcore territory with its more-graphic-than-usual sex scenes and which broke heteronormative molds by exploring explicitly LGBT themes. The image of Samantha Micelli cavorting with individuals from every portion of the sexual spectrum was a watershed moment in 90s adolescence—the sort young people hadn’t experienced since Drew Barrymore ignited the collective teen imagination in 1992’s POISON IVY. It perhaps only made sense, then, that the decision was made to drop Milano into what was envisioned as the long-awaited follow-up to that film, POISON IVY 2: LILY, available now in a four-disc set from Shout Factory.
While the first film walked a tightrope between American exploitation movie and European art film, LILY leans more towards the latter category, shying away from its predecessor’s more depraved elements and instead focusing on one insecure young woman’s fraught sexual awakening. At the start of the film, the titular Lily is someone very much like Milano—a sweet-natured, wide-eyed young person eager to buck free from the confines of her small Michigan town and reinvent herself as a bohemian art student in California. Her aspirations towards a more continental way of life get off to a promising start when she finds a room in something of an artist’s boarding house, populated by such eccentrics as a bubbly lesbian who takes an immediate liking to her and a quasi-mute, bowler-wearing cellist. The biggest boon about Lily’s new digs, though, is the mysterious box she finds that was left behind by a previous tenant. In a bit of retconning, we learn that Ivy—Barrymore’s character from the first film—briefly lived here as well, and left behind something approximating an erotic time capsule, filled with diary entries about her own sexploits and sheafs of homemade pornography (in yet another instance of the retconning that will come to define the franchise, the woman in the photos is clearly not Drew Barrymore, and in fact appears to be Milano herself with different hair and makeup).
For the sake of keeping Lily a sympathetic protagonist, the diary conveniently omits any stories of dad fucking or murder, and instead focuses on salacious yet harmless adventures that spark our heroine’s suppressed sexual imagination. Figuring she always intended to reinvent herself, Lily decides to style herself after Ivy, assuming a heretofore unknown confident demeanor and sensuous persona that brings her to the attention of two different men on campus. The first is Gredin (Johnathon Schaech), who’s something approximating a human personification of the 90s’ inherent skeeviness. From his mononym and defiance-for-defiance’s sake attitude to his frosted tips and scruff beard, he looks and acts like he escaped from the set of a particularly cheap porno film. He’s the epitome of the era’s Skeet Ulrich-meets-Johnny Depp, “get you hooked on speed but you’ll like it” masculine ideal, which of course puts him on a collision course with Lily’s bed. The second man is a bit more suspect, although no more aesthetically put together.
If Gredin is the platonic ideal of rough trade then Professor Donald Falk is the epitome of your best friend’s Eagles-loving dad, a balding effete with a Kenny Loggins beard and a wardrobe that screams “Ingmar Bergman cosplay.” Forget that he’s Lily’s art teacher—he’s also very married, and the father of the bafflingly named Daphna, whom Lily has begun babysitting. As we’ll find out, Donald isn’t just an artist but one of the tortured sorts, who’s only really able to express himself artistically when he’s also expressing himself sexually—ideally with his subjects. Because the POISON IVY franchise is, at its heart, built around the idea of banging somebody’s dad, it’s not long before Lily is hooking up with both Gredin and Donald. As anyone who saw the first movie knows, Ivy didn’t exactly meet a good end, and Lily soon realizes that she herself may be headed towards tragedy.
LILY is fascinating for a variety of reasons, including the way it both plays some of the conventions of the first film completely straight while subverting others. Both films revolve around sexually confident young women seeking validation in the arms of older men; both include subtly explored but ultimately pointless LGBT themes; both begin as character-driven dramas before segueing into thriller territory. While the first film worked equally hard to eroticize both Barrymore and Tom Skeritt, though, this time around, the gaze is explicitly on Johnathon Schaech. Although Milano has ample opportunity to look and act sexy, when it comes time for the actual sex, he’s the one showing more skin and the one whose body the camera lovingly ogles. While the first film was ostensibly meant for female viewers, this time around, it’s much more explicit that this was meant to excite the feminine sexual imagination. Young men who popped in the VHS for Milano certainly wouldn’t have been disappointed, but it was the women in the audience who walked away with the real prize (as did gay men, who compose a sizable portion of the film’s cult following). Too, while thriller elements do eventually evolve, they do so very late in the game, with much of the movie’s emphasis on Lily’s character arc and growth as a confident, sexually assured woman. You could shave the final half hour off of this and easily market it as an edgy indy drama.
Oh, but those final thirty minutes…
Rarely has a film undergone such a radical tonal shift, and, in doing so, gone from cheesy-but-thoughtful erotic thriller to just plain bonkers.
In what could almost be a self-contained short film, the final act consists of Lily and Gredin going to Donald’s house for dinner, during which all of the main characters are inexplicably re-introduced to one another and every pertinent plot-thread and backstory is reiterated. This strange bit of re-exposition sets up an Adult Swim–worthy series of events: after Daphna (fucking Daphna) asks Lily to tuck her in, Donald jumps her in the hallway and tries to rape her, right outside his daughter’s bedroom. The act is witnessed both by Gredin (who, being a 90s dudebro, scoffs and walks away) and Daphna, who flips the fuck out and runs into the street in slow-motion, the camera weirdly lingering on the image of her stuffed bunny (who, I shit you not, is listed in the end credits). Lily, Donald, and his wife all chase after the girl, who bolts into the path of an oncoming car driven by a clueless seeming slovenly dude. Daphna’s hit, sending Mr. Bunny flying into the air in a shot guaranteed to give the audience hysterics. As everyone crowds around the girl, it turns out she’s apparently the world’s most resilient six-year-old, shrugging off having just been plowed down by a sedan. That the girl doesn’t have blood pouring out of her mouth is enough to satisfy Donald, who follows Lily back to the boarding house for a truncated stalk-n-slash sequence. That gives us one of the all-time hilarious non-sequiters in erotic thriller history, when the heretofore silent cellist suddenly pops out of the shadows Jason Voorhees-style to tell Donald in a sincere deadpan “The police are on their way” before getting KO’ed. If you hired Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim to re-enact the final thirty minutes of the movie, it could seriously be taken as a bit of absurdist humor. Played straight as it is here, it’s nothing short of amazing.
LILY was, if nothing else, a fascinating way to jump-start a franchise. Usually, the second film in a series will affirm the narrative direction it’ll take, establishing certain character or plot beats and giving audiences an idea of what they’re in for. Viewers of the first two IVY films could be forgiven for not having any concrete idea of what the franchise’s cohesive vision would be, if there indeed was even going to be a vision at all, beyond dad-fucking (why is that phrase so funny to type?). This was the 90s, though. Narrative cohesion didn’t matter—numbers did, and Lily became just as much of a cult totem as its predecessor had, especially once it discovered a second-life on late-night cable, where it seemed to play in an endless rotation (indeed, I think Lily has enjoyed the most screenings of any film in the franchise, though I may be wrong). The stage was set for POISON IVY to really spread its wings with POISON IVY 3: THE NEW SEDUCTION
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