Those Times Michael Crichton Got Horny: A Brief Account of 90s Erotic Thrillers and Experiments in Early AI

Let's talk about porn. Not the "Know it when I see it" kind - the verboten kind, but the softcore - the type for which Cinemax and Showtime were initially founded. There's something inherently funny about that period in the 80s and 90s when they tried to make it more palatable to the general public. Comedian Dave Anthony often jokingly reflects on the 70s, when hardcore was first popularized and you'd attend a screening of Behind The Green Door with people from your community, like your dentist. By the time I was a theatregoer, though, they ran those in different theatres and scrambled cable channels. Before even dial-up was a time when curiosity and confusion were your only motivation. Then one day, you'd find the dilapidated, sunburnt pages of a Playboy or Penthouse from six months back in the desert and that'd be your first exposure.  

The softcore kind, however, was booming— packing in audiences of parents at the nearest multiplex right next door to screenings of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm. For most 90s children, the erotic thrillers popular in their heyday are films we're only catching up with now - save for a few precious minutes we snuck channel surfing. Folks, perhaps it's only the basic cinematic competence of films from that time, but so far we've all been far more impressed with them than our parents. 

Rising Sun was one of the first such films that I stumbled upon cable one day, with a particularly graphic opening 20 minutes.  No child could possibly care about a corporate murder mystery with bizarre racial overtones, but Rising Sun had the ultimate kid cheatcode: Michael Crichton. By 1994, a year after I'd seen Jurassic Park in theatres no less than eight times, the author's name was associated only with Velociraptors and Dilophosaurs. A few years later, we'd gladly pack in for Congo, another Crichton adaptation that dealt with an extinct species, and were treated to two hours of a man in a gorilla suit doing sign language (it's a film for which I still have great affection, nevertheless). Crichton's name was everywhere in the press, and with it came promises of more Mezozoic carnage. 

There were no dinosaurs in Rising Sun, but Crichton's name got us curious. Couple that with a maturing young boy's curiosity about the female body and a crippling lack of sex education, you get something as potentially lethal as a prehistoric lizard.  And the non-dinosaur Crichton films kept coming. Rising Sun and Disclosure, his erotic thrillers adapted by Phillip Kaufmann and Barry Sonnenfeld, respectively, couldn't be more hyper focused on the issues of the decade: sexual harassment, incensed racist paranoia and corporate mergers. 

Rising Sun opens on, well, just that, and it's meant as a portend. Like the submarine under the San Diego pier in Spielberg's doomed 1941, The Japanese Are Coming. Anti-Japanese sentiment may have started right after Pearl Harbour, but it lingered and burrowed, and fears of a new economic invasion were not real, but widely reported. The end of the Cold War and the start of Japan's economic growth in the 1970s suddenly meant that it was viewed as legitimate competition. Myths about great Japanese business strategy and tradition had spread like a game of broken telephone (some true, some hilariously false), and you can still find supposed great business hysterically misusing Sun Tzu's The Art of War (later starring Wesley Snipes, and Tzu was Chinese, but, hey). 

The underlying assumption is, of course, that they're going to take our women. So when a call girl winds up dead at the LA corporate office of the Nakatomo corporation, a black detective (Snipes) and a retired liaison (Sean Connery) between Japanese and American affairs is tasked to investigate. The company's early work in AI creates some very 90s novelty that complicates the case, and gives Sean Connery Wesley Snipes' head at one point. 

The whole thing is very funny and would be much more openly laughable were it not for Connery's icy cool performance, and the lack of any real murder mystery leaves to film free to let the two of them riff. They have chemistry, undeniably, and it's about the only aspect of the film that keeps it running. 

As uncomfortable and bizarre is as Rising Sun about its racism, the book is reportedly much worse, with Crichton even outing the killer as an enemy invader. Kaufmann, perhaps more sober-minded and well-meaning, is disinterested. The killer is revealed - it's the smug corporate American - but he's killed offscreen, last seen being entombed in the very cement on which the new Japanese headquarters will be.  It's not particularly great filmmaking, but what it does offer is a glimpse into damage control - as if Kaufmann were a moderator at a debate who must cope with an inflammatory conservative. If Rising Sun makes anything very apparent, it's that Michael Crichton was an author with issues; issues that would develop into him naming a child molestor character in a book after a climate change scientist with whom he took umbrage. (It's also a good time to note that some of the research was inspired by Toronto critic Jesse Hawken's excellent podcast on the film, ep. 123 of Junk Filter). 

Disclosure's worse, whose answer to the great mystery of sex politics of the 90s is that the woman gets to slap the guy on the ass, too. Michael Douglas is the smuggest of corporate yuppies, the kind who says things like, "Couldn't have happened to a nicer guy" about someone's misfortune. Crichton and Sonnenfeld were lucky to have had Douglas, who so perfectly filled those Gordon Gekko shoes for the avarice-loving. He's the best thing about Disclosure, the cockiest son of a bitch in the room. 

That confidence is shaken when Demi Moore, a former flame, shows up and forces oral sex on him. The scene is graphic, absurd, and hysterical in ways that belong specifically to the early 90s. At once slapstick and intentionally shocking, Moore's enthusiastic. Douglas, fresh off Basic Instinct, is no slouch, the whole thing is just disgusting sensationalism.  It's no help that Disclosure also features the worst of all 90s men: Dennis Miller.  

Of course, Moore has ulterior motives related to corporate intrigue - and I use that word incredibly loosely. There's nothing intriguing about Disclosure's VR, it's aged as well as Brett Leonard's The Lawnmower Man, replete with a control command from Douglas: Doit. 

Do it. Do the sex with the millionaire. Do the client who is clearly wrapping you around her finger. Do the real estate deal that puts Michael Keaton downstairs. Do the corporate merger, as that appears to be all that was at stake in 90s thrillers: a deep-rooted, impersonator-syndrome-inspired terror at the notion that someone, somewhere, was doing it better than you. 

What Women Want (2000)

90s VR and AI, in Rising Sun, Disclosure and in works like The Lawnmower Man, are used often to expose the deep-seated kinks and urges of the brilliant basement scientists that develop them. Retroactively, it makes Elon Musk's handjob-for-a-horse anecdote funnier. 

Halloween: Every Corner

Halloween didn't scare me when I first saw it at 13. I'd already seen Paul McCrane melt into a toxic sludge monster in Robocop when I was four. By 90s standards, surely there was nothing in this old movie that could shock me. It was made in the Seventies, after all, and the blood back then always looked too orange for this cynic. Just not real enough. 

What Halloween did do was fascinate me to no end and - okay - maybe a few of those shots of Michael lurking in the background got under my skin. Maybe I rewatched it the next day to be sure I knew exactly when he'd be around every corner. Maybe it put me a little on edge, but what fascinated me most was how a California-shot film so perfectly encaptured the essence of the season nationwide, for such a meager budget. With a few bags of dead leaves and maybe a bucket of blood, John Carpenter managed to articulate that which had become commonplace to my generation. Like his transmission from the nightmarish future in Prince of Darkness, he was broadcasting outward, pushing like the winds that once blew the brown material and dirt into mini whirlwinds in my high school hallways. It was something Paul Winfield would inflect into his narration of "City Confidential" on the old Arts & Entertainment network and countless episodes of "Dateline". It was innately understood: There's something wrong in the suburbs, something evil and omnipresent. 

It's no accident that my love for the picture only grew as I came to understand its historical place. Coupled with my passion for Oliver Stone's JFK and halfway through Jim Garrison's source material, I was well on my way to youthful obsessions about Watergate (I did set foot aboard Nixon's Air Force One shortly before they flew it out for his funeral). Watergate and its wake left the US in a glum state, the pardoning of the president was less a solution than was Jimmy Carter, whose campaign might best be remembered in Altman's Nashville hyperbole ("Hasn't Christmas always smelled like oranges to you?")  It may sound like a bizarre childhood, but the US '90s was as freewheelin' a period imaginable, with our happy, sexy, sax-playing, Democratic president making the office look cool for the first time again since Kennedy. A nostalgia for the 60s had brewed over. It would last about 5 years. 

Of course, to assume anything about Halloween is inherently political would be ludicrous. The film has about as much an ideology as its ill-fated teens. Instead, it's all in the vibes, the same way crystals were being hawked by sham mystics and self-help gurus up and down the coastline. It's a feeling - totally a feeling. All of Halloween, save for Loomis the straight man, is so carefree.  Annie and Linda are carefree. Even the local cop, Annie's dad, is letting loose. He ignores obvious weed smoke pouring from his daughter's car window and Loomis' legitimate concerns - hey, everyone's entitled to one good scare.  Their parents are otherwise absent save for a brief shot of Laurie's father leaving her with the dangerous chore of dropping the key at the Myers' place. One can easily assume they're headed to a key party thrown by Sigourney Weaver's character in The Ice Storm. 

It's Donald Pleasance's iconic turn as Loomis that became the heart of the franchise if there was any. The best visual representation of what the franchise truly became is that of the late Moustapha Akkad, killed in a suicide bomb in a hotel lobby in Jordan in 2005, greedily cradling a Michael Myers action figure. Loomis from the outset, though, is a very bad doctor. He makes it very clear that he all but abandoned Michael after only a few years of what appeared to be completely conventional treatment. At the very least, he's a doctor ill-equipped and understaffed. His staff couldn't be bothered, they let Michael wander the grounds and hardly question how he learned to drive a car. Totally careless. 

 

What is not carefree about Halloween is the camerawork, so masterfully controlled and composed. There's not a scene without Michael's presence felt or insinuated by Carpenter's haunting, dreadful keyboard. The suburbs were a place of menace, even without boogeymen like Myers. Beyond the upsetting racial history behind the founding of Levittown, New Jersey, there's a fascistic adherence to order still carried out today by homeowner's associations.  By my time in Tucson, that evil was represented by faux-adobe townhouses that all looked the same, with identical red pebble gardens out front. However, there was another, more tangible monster that came to visit. 

My town's boogeyman was named Charles Schmid and he was long before my time. Mr. Browning, my AP Government teacher, swore he'd come into his parent's shop on University Avenue, sporting his fake mole and boots packed with crushed soda cans to elevate his height.  Years later, my brother and I would find a spread on him in Life Magazine that detailed his crimes. The Pied Piper of Tucson murders is still of such notable scandal that just asking about it on a Facebook Group is only met with hushed, curt sadness and a polite "We don't like to talk about that here". Schmid's murders had apparently made some Tucsonan parents uncomfortable to learn of their teenager's nightly habits. The notion of a shared town trauma so clumsily introduced in David Gordon Green's recent trilogy has roots here. Halloween, though, never required a sequel, despite what box office demanded. Its blunt mic drop end is more than enough, because there's always going to be another, just waiting. 

While I lived there, just two hours North, another boogeyman would emerge. Bryan Patrick Miller, better known as The Zombie Hunter for his cosplay, would be later sentenced to death for the murders of Angela Brosso and Melanie Bernas. 

Both of them were separated by decades and location, both of whose costumes played a crucial role in their M.O. The costume of a killer can be anything, but more often than not, it's a uniform. Michael Myers is that blank, white face upon which we can project anything. It could be something down the street, it could be something in your own home, it could just be the entire damn atmosphere of the country. He's the encroaching evil and cancer we allowed to fester and metastasize, no different from the hordes of the anonymous undead in Romero's film that came before or the First Blood for which veterans would soon bay.  

Why I Love Piranha

I first read about Piranha in the 1997 edition of Leonard Maltin's film guide. Prior to the internet, 1000-plus page tomes with 8-point font by Maltin and Mick Martin & Marsha Porter were not ideal sources for film criticism, but they did serve as a fairly comprehensive guide of what was possibly gathering dust at video stores in your area code. You could care less about their ratings, and often the "Turkeys" or “BOMBS” looked more appealing. Maltin rated it three stars, which was considerably higher than most B-fare in his catalog. More importantly, he included a cast list before the blurb, including both Kevin McCarthy of Invasion of the Body Snatchers fame and Bradford Dillman, the lead in the third Planet of the Apes film - the one where they travel back to the present (the best!). It was also from Joe Dante, the director of Gremlins and more importantly, Gremlins 2: The New Batch - which featured Maltin getting attacked by the titular creatures. To a 13-year-old me, no further sale was necessary. From that point on, I was determined to see Piranha.

To understand why my quest to see Piranha took on Grail-like proportions in my mind, one must first familiarize themselves with the curt, dismissive way Maltin, Martin & Porter could write off a cool-sounding movie. Maltin had disparaged many films I loved, most notably John Carpenter’s The Thing, but these volumes did provide terrific ledgers of film history. The downside would often be the 50-75 word blurbs provided, which left you starving for so much more than their snobbery.

The other reason finding Piranha felt Grail-like is, like many other out-of-print films over the years, it had become such. Tucson, Arizona was not known for its great film libraries, and out-of-print films that weren’t popular at Blockbuster required a bit of searching.  By the time I found Piranha, over a year had passed. The quest likely could have been shortened, there were easier ways to find out-of-print movies pre-internet, but age and inexperience left me equipped only with a phone and directory. There was no search engine or database online of where to go, and torrenting was still years away, particularly for a file of that size. 

After calling every video store in Tucson, I finally received a "Yep" from a clerk at Director's Chair Video, approximately a 45-minute drive. Carless, my brother and mother surprised me with a rental copy one evening. After messing up trying to dub a copy, I gave up, happy that I'd seen it at least once and more than ready to cite it as "superior to Jaws" at parties. Young cinephiles are prone to that kind of hyperbole, particularly when they reach the age of hip contrarianism where trashing Spielberg is en vogue. 

A year later, though, it was released on DVD - just one among a swath of Tuesday releases at Suncoast and Borders - forever putting an end to long, often frantic quests to find forgotten films that so often peppered my youth.  I think of those journeys fondly as endless drives through the sweltering summers to antique shops where "antique" was applied liberally to include Kenner Star Wars action figures and old VHS. My brother and I would hit those Sunday fairs once a month at my former elementary school for records that rarely cost more than a quarter; curiosity shops with names like Americana that later would be inherited by the owner's ungrateful children and transformed into gaudy electronic music havens. These unappraised troves often contained ties emblazoned with a golden elephant and the words, "Goldwater '64" and rare copies of Re-Animator.  We celebrated the advent of DVD, marveled at the MST3k-esque commentary track on Ghostbusters. DVD included special features for which a film nerd from the past would commit treason, but they could never recapture the unadulterated glee derived from finding something truly precious.  A youthful lack of foresight left me only excited at the prospect, not yet disheartened by the loss of long outings in the desert with my brother that would also be associated with first listenings of Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, The White Stripes and Gene Clark. There is much of that era that is forever lost, not the least of which was the affordability of the hunt.  

Piranha comes from another transitionary period for cinema, shortly after Jaws had claimed hegemony at the box office and blockbusters became the dominant form.  With the first blockbuster came the first attempts to capitalize on it that usually fell into one of three categories — hysterical foreign ripoffs, desperate big-budget ripoffs and cheap cash-ins. Piranha falls quite firmly in the last category and late to the party, with Dante often joking it's more of a send-up of the sequel. The opening scene, though, is unquestionably Jaws-lite, as two teenage campers canoodle in a mysterious swimming pool in the forest. There's something in the pool, and both are pulled under as the water turns crimson and the film's title card rises from the water.  

While trying to find the missing teens, a plucky private investigator (Heather Menzies) and a grizzly, extremely divorced Bradford Dillman accidentally set a school of genetically mutated piranha loose on Lost River Lake.  As the school descends toward civilization, the two are on a race to warn a summer camp where Dillman's daughter is staying, not to mention the grand opening of a new resort community by a never-sleazier Dick Miller. 

The script is as inventive as and playful as its director, though it took a while to get there. Before playwright-to-be John Sayles revised it, writer Richard Robinson had trouble figuring out a reason to get the people in the water, at first relying on a rogue bear. Once that bit of convolution was removed, Sayles wrote a script that references the B-grade horror of the past far more than Jaws and heaping satire. On the sidelines, the TV media deliver salacious commentary: “Terror. Horror. Death. Film at 11.” It’s a level of disdain Dante and Sayles retain for the media-employed cast of The Howling. The film is no less sly about it’s main villains, who one-up Jaws' corrupt mayor at every turn and include greedy land developers, government bureaucrats, irresponsible camp counselors and even mad scientists. It's in the latter that Dante first plays in Gremlins territory, utilizing Rob Bottin's excellent early stop-motion in a Bride of Frankenstein homage early on. The monsters wander around mad Dr. Hoak (Kevin McCarthy)'s laboratory aimlessly, like Harryhausen creations put to pasture or, worse, rejects from the production line. It’s equal parts creepy, vaguely forlorn and strangely funny.  Just look at this miserable bastard: 

Dante perfectly incorporates the insane demands of a schlock producer - including three climaxes - staged with a sense of humour at once broad and winking.  The third finale devolves into an elaborate practical joke on the audience, involving an allegedly tense 90-second countdown that in movie time manages to drag out for five minutes. Dillman must swim to a flooded smelting plant and, in one of the strangest and funniest eco-horror twists unleash toxic waste into the lake to kill the mutant fish. As the scene progresses, the countdown clock stops aligning with objective reality and every cut back to Menzies announcing how many seconds have passed is met with skepticism, then guffaw.  

Otherwise, Dante pulls out every trick he learned at Corman film school and uses them masterfully - employing skip-frame car chases and other optical tricks like the aforementioned stop-motion. It’s the kind of early resume work that would impress  industry insiders - and did. When Universal levied a lawsuit against New World Pictures, it was Spielberg who screened the film, told them to drop it and later hired Dante. Piranha can also be pretty horrific, saving one of its most brutal deaths for a likable camp counselor who is pulled into a bloody oblivion.  

Piranha is a goofy B-grade horror film played almost entirely straight. It's also the basis for a major early aughts remake where much of the same material is played for big laughs as opposed to subtle winks. Piranha 3D, directed by Alexandre Aja, sat in development hell for years in the hands of The Blob remake director Chuck Russell. By production, however, the mid-2000s were in full swing. While shockingly faithful in many respects - can’t help but turn up the laugh track. Not that Dante doesn’t hesitate to have a flying fish leap out of the water and bite Paul Bartel’s nose.  In the remake, it’s Jerry O’Connell’s penis. 

The only thing worth mentioning about the Corman-produced 1995 direct-to-video remake is it's cast list, featuring William Katt, Alexandra Paul,  Leland Orser and Mila Kunis. Though, if you're curious, you can watch it here. 

I still have, among my things, the dubbed VHS of Piranha with no sound, and I’ve since bought the Roger Corman classics DVD and the Shout Factory DVD. I’ve yet to upgrade further, but I will.  Physical media has unquestionably had a banner few years, and my algorithm has alerted me to the fact that there’s now a 4K in existence. Further releases have only unveiled more about the film’s history, including stories about why Menzies used a body double for a nude scene and the fact that actor Eric Braeden was used in Kevin McCarthy’s underwater shots. I love those little details found on special features now. They’ve filled in what was once an endless, wonderous, ever-mysterious void that made cinema a little more curious - completely relatable, but never fully attainable. 

Time Echoes

It's 2023 and I've found a copy of Todd Solondz' Storytelling at a thrift shop in Montreal. Now, Solondz had gone bankrupt...