By the late 90s, the erotic thriller had gone on something approaching a hero’s journey. In the 80s, there had been a call to adventure as audiences titillated by the teasing but tame sensuality of films like FLASHDANCE and 9 ½ WEEKS demanded more out of their cinematic smut. Supernatural aid arrived in the form of the rise of cable TV and the miraculous direct-to-video boom of the early 90s, giving the burgeoning subgenre the extra-special-something it needed to succeed. Challenges and temptations arose as mainstream Hollywood emerged as a player with big box-office competition. Finally, our hero achieved the ultimate boon as Cinemax emerged as a power-player, solidifying the erotic thriller as a reliable standby—from both an entertainment and financial perspective.
Yet those who know the full trajectory of Joseph Conrad’s monomyth understand that, contrary to popular belief, the hero’s journey doesn’t end with the great victory. Our protagonist—changed by experience—may not want to go back home. There may still be battles to be fought; Odysseus may still need to bury his oar. Often, too, while the hero part may be over, the journey may just be at a point of transition. Heroes often become villains; Anakin transforms into Darth Vader, Michael Corleone coldly assumes the mantle of Godfather. Such was the case for the erotic thriller in the late 90s, though the Mephistopholean price of its victory was complacency rather than outright villainy. The genre had once been new and exciting, pushing narrative and cinematic boundaries, even if there were more than often concessions to the fantastic or melodramatic. Once, there had been people who cared at the helm: Adrian Lyne with his fusion of eroticism, new wave aesthetics, and pop music; Zalman King with his Northern Jew’s fever-dream fantasies of the lily-white Deep South; Joe Esterhaz with… whatever the fuck was up with Joe Esterhaz.
Look at an erotic thriller from the latter half of the 90s, though, and there’s a palpable exhaustion onscreen—a fierce genericism that lets the audience know the powers-that-be had determined the most effective template for their craft and were sticking with it, no matter what. It’s safe to say that erotic thrillers had become the M*A*S*H of the softcore world: always playing somewhere, and the faces were often the same, but there were too many of them to fully absorb and the plots all seemed to bleed together.
It was into this pornographic wasteland that POISON IVY 3: THE NEW SEDUCTION emerged.
EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE—the braindead bodice ripper that had launched Anne Goursard and Alyssa Milano into the realm of the erotic thriller—infamously grossed $15 million in VHS sales from a nation eager to watch Samantha Micelli get felt up by one of the dudes from Spandau Ballet. Financial information is a little less forthcoming on its spiritual successor, POISON IVY 2, but, whatever it made, it was apparently enough for a third film in the franchise to get greenlit. While the first IVY had been an indy darling and the second a watershed moment in terms of helping to solidify a former sitcom darling as a bankable sex symbol, POISON IVY 3: THE NEW SEDUCTION was… well, it was like M*A*S*H. It was just kind of there.
You can be forgiven for thinking the plot of NEW SEDUCTION sounds strikingly familiar: Violet (Jaime Pressly)– a sexually-assured, self-confident but severely disturbed young woman– reconnects with Joy (Megan Edwards), her introverted, sexually repressed, possibly lesbian/bisexual BFF whom she hasn’t seen in years, ever since Violet’s own mother broke up the marriage of Joy’s parents. In the interim, both girls’ mothers have died, and each hope that they can put the past behind them and renew their friendship as they enter the tumultuous world of their 20s. While Joy is elated at having the idea of another, more worldly girl around to help her navigate her own difficult transition into adulthood, Violet has different ideas. See, Violet had a sister. You may know her. Her name was Ivy. She’s dead now, but her spirit lives on in Violet, who blames their mother’s premature demise on the way that Joy’s dad, Ivan (Michael des Barres—the dude from Macguyver and Power Station) kicked her to the curb when their affair came to the attention of his spooky wife, Catherine. As Joy innocently embraces having her “sister” back, Violet sets about a campaign of seduction, luring both Ivan and Joy’s meathead boyfriend Michael into her web. Will the curiously named housekeeper Mrs. B (a seriously slumming Susan Tyrrel) expose her plot before it’s too late? Will that bag of hardcore S&M gear Violet totes around ever come into serious play? Will there be copious dad fucking? Did anyone still give a damn at this point?
If anything can be said for NEW SEDUCTION it’s that the writer at least watched, kinda understood, and sort of cared about the first two films in the series. The world of erotic thrillers was never terribly concerned with concessions to continuity or narrative cohesion. Even when there were ostensible connections between films in a “franchise,” they tended to be tenuous at best. More often than not, similar titles acted as shorthand for an experience rather than to indicate that a film would be the next installment in an ongoing story, the way the name “Emmanuelle” in the title became a byword for globetrotting Europorn rather than a literal indication the character of Emmanuelle Arsan would be featured, or how Canon’s NINJA movies were only thematically linked by martial arts action and the presence of actor Sho Kosugi. The creators could’ve easily taken a similar tack here, but, instead, there’s an actual effort to try and tie the mythos of three films together into a cohesive narrative—a rare choice for the direct-to-video third installment in an also-ran franchise.
For viewers of the first two films, there’s a sort of weird, comforting familiarity to the opening minutes, which take the form of an extended flashback depicting Ivy and Violet as children. Particularly striking is Sabrinah Christie as the diminutive Ivy—not only does she have the character’s excessive hairdo, but the girl has also managed to capture some of Drew Barrymore’s flip nihilism and love of chaos. When L’il Ivy glibly tells her playmates “There’s gonna be fireworks” upon realizing shit’s about to go down, there’s a certain sublime joy in the moment, and you almost wish that this were an “evil child” prequel to the first film rather than a half-assed remake of it. Later, once Violet has sunk her claws into the family, we get some vague intimations about Ivy’s demise, again delivering a strangely satisfying dose of nostalgia and continuity.
Indeed, writer Karen Kelly (an old pro at the subgenre, whose writing credits include the seminal Shannon Tweed vehicle SCORNED), at last achieved something approaching a unifying vision for what makes a Poison Ivy movie. I pointed out in my entry on LILY how, in the series’ second installment, the creators didn’t seem quite sure what this franchise wanted to be. Kelly took the step of making those decisions herself, weaving elements of the previous two films together to make something approaching a cohesive trilogy. So, under Kelly’s tutelage, what is a POISON IVY movie? A POISON IVY movie will deal with the influence of the titular girl on the lives of unsuspecting, complacent, upper-middle-class people, be it through her direct presence, her writings, or a family member. The movie will feature a protagonist or villain-protagonist named after a type of plant, whom we can colloquially call our “Ivy”; the protagonist will be a troubled or sheltered young woman who has an unhealthy relationship with her own sexuality; the Ivy will find herself drawn to an older, wealthy, unhappy man whose primary identity is his role as a father in a nuclear family; the Ivy will engage in dad-fucking with said older man; the revelation of the affair will have a violent fallout; a character will reveal themselves as manipulative and dangerous to someone who previously trusted them; and the final act will devolve into a stalk-n-slash sequence, often with someone falling to his or her death. It’s doesn’t have the unifying vision of, say, JAMES BOND, but, hey, it’s a lot more than the erotic thrillers of the era tended to offer.
A brief but notable tangent: NEW SEDUCTION fulfills/prefigures “The Rules” laid out in SCREAM 3, the third entry in another, much more important and competently made franchise. Violet turns out to be much more of a physical threat than either of the previous villains; more people die, including characters whose analogues survived the previous films; and, most of all, the film is concerned with the past coming back to haunt people in unexpected ways, including new revelations about previously established characters. It’s a cool bit of validation on the part of SCREAM 3 that Kevin Williamson and Ehren Kruger had their thumbs so firmly on the pulse of horror trilogies, to the point they could even call the beats of the cut-rate, made-for-VHS sleaze variety.
There’s a few more interesting things going on besides that attempt at unity, though the film is largely hit and miss- its positives stand out precisely because so much of the movie sinks so far beneath the quality of its predecessors. (NEW SEDUCTION has a significantly lower budget, with 90% of the film’s action isolated to Ivan’s mansion, which was probably either a weekend rental or loaned to the production by someone’s friend or family member). Jaime Pressly—in one of her first roles—makes for an effective villain, and while director Kurt Voss chooses to leeringly ogle her often nude body (a stark departure from the visual language of the first two, female-directed films), it’s her face that deserves the real attention here, as she displays an expressiveness that conveys depths of insanity a lesser actress couldn’t even have hinted at. While Ivy was troubled and Lily just made poor decisions, Pressly lets you know with nothing more than the look in her eyes or a twitch in her jaw that Violet is seriously fucking bonkers. She’s able to bring a subtle menace to the role other actresses wouldn’t have been able to convey, let alone even go for, and the result is a more memorable performance than the movie deserves. While Pressly has gone on to have a successful career in comedy, her turn here really makes the viewer wish she’d been given more genre opportunities; it’s easy to see her evolving into a character actress along the lines of costar Tyrell, whom she’s able to go toe-to-toe with for sheer eccentricity in their few scenes together.
In another nice departure, Kelly’s script goes into full-tilt horror territory in its final moments, revealing Violet’s demented plot to orchestrate a mass murder/suicide at the behest of her childhood doll. It’s… a lot, and speaks to what could have been had more competent or concerned people been around to help her craft it into something more. On that last note—NEW SEDUCTION is absolutely riddled with plot holes and dropped threads, from a mysterious, possibly congenital sexual “dysfunction” Joy and her mother are alluded to suffer from—and which might be lesbianism—to Violet’s secret double-life as a dominatrix to the ultimate fate of a main character, whose death is alluded to but never confirmed. If POISON IVY prefigured the rise of big-budget erotic thrillers, NEW SEDUCTION is a few years ahead of the curve in predicting the interchangeable, soft-focus raunch that would inform the aesthetics of Tommy Wiseau’s THE ROOM.
NEW SEDUCTION is patently not a good movie, but, dammit, it’s an enjoyable movie, and it serves as an interesting time capsule of an era when even the smut peddlers were starting to get bored selling their own wares. Ending as it does on such an abrupt and anticlimactic note, it’s something of an elegy for DTV and cable erotic thrillers, who in just a few years would be supplanted by that merciless purveyor of unlimited gratification that is the internet. Skinemax may have hung around into the new millennium, and there may still be cut-rate DTV DVDs being churned out (have you visited a Family Video lately? Who’s still making this stuff?), but they would never again enjoy the power, prominence, or social cache they had in the 90s. If one franchise had to carry the responsibility of both epitomizing and eulogizing that era, you couldn’t make a better choice than POISON IVY, or a better film than NEW SEDUCTION.
This was a series that always had one foot in thriller/horror territory, though; and like so many slashers before, Ivy was poised to rise from the dead in unexpected and deeply stupid ways. Next time, join us for the end (?) of POISON IVY as we unexpectedly jump ahead into the new millennium for POISON IVY 4: THE SECRET SOCIETY.
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