Take a Walk on the Sleazy Side With 'Wild Things'

John McNaughton’s Wild Things asks the burning question, “What would you do to have a threesome with Neve Campbell and Denise Richards?” It’s a fair question.

The movie’s answer is a pulpy, sweaty, horny, yawp. McNaughton, a journeyman director who nevertheless understood how to capture desire and yearning onscreen, steeps Wild Things in a haze of breathless sleaze. It’s a movie populated by damaged people looking for ways to climb the social ladder, hopefully by way of climbing into a rich woman’s pants. 

Whether or not the plot holds together is immaterial. It only matters that it holds while you’re watching the movie. What drives Wild Things is the way everyone feels trapped in one way or another. McNaugton and Stephen Peters script set the libidinous neo-noir in a humid, dangerous swamp, a not-so-subtle visual representation of their character's psyche. More specifically, Wild Things exists in an erotic luminal space called Blue Bay, a small town without a middle class.

The characters in Wild Things act cool and calm, but soon reveal a caged feral animal below the surface. Like all noirs, Peters’s script understands that the plot is merely an excuse to explore a sea of deranged, horny, sick characters. In no other genre would we so readily accept a character named Sam Lombardo.  

Played by Matt Dillon, channeling Joe Don Baker, Sam has the veneer of respectability. But the respectability never reaches his eyes. He doesn’t walk through the halls of Blue Bay High; he struts-or better yet, stalks. He doesn’t see people, he sees opportunities.

Which is why, as the film opens, we are wary of him. He says and does the right things, such as being staunchly reticent to accept the advances of the ultra-barely legal femme fatale Kelly Van Ryan. But it's his eyes that betray the sinner beneath the saint. Still, even when Kelly drops the accusation of sexual assault, it becomes clear that something is afoot. Amongst the sweaty, bare-chested men and tempestuous teens played by women in their late 20s, Wild Things careens through its knotted story at a breakneck pace.

Richards plays Kelly as the Uber-Femme. A spoiled rich girl with permanent bedroom eyes, pillowy lips, and breasts so ripe you want to pluck them. She's a walking wet dream. Richard’s is fantasy incarnate, and she makes every gesture and syllable sound like the prelude to paradise. 

You can’t blame Kelly for chasing Sam. After all, he’s a suave hunk who has made his way through the lonely women of Blue Bay yacht club like a virus. The film implies Sam’s past several times. My favorite instance is with Kelly’s Mom, Sandra, played by the bodacious and stacked Theresa Russell.

There are three sets of perfect breasts in Wild Things; we only get to see two of them: one is Richards', and the other is Russell's. Russell is the star of films like Whore and Insignificant, where she played my favorite Marilyn Monroe. Busty, horny, sad, and intelligent is an explosive combo, and Russell pulls it off brilliantly in her few brief scenes. Russell brings a raw carnality to Wild Things that helps set the tone early on. 

Richards and Russell share the same kind of simmering, wounded sex-pot energy. In the few scenes we get of Russell, we instantly clock a cold, calculating she-bitch with a bank account bigger than her bra size. Russell has but a few scenes, both naked and fully clothed, but if it weren’t for Bill Murray as the down-on-his-luck slimy ambulance-chasing prototype for Saul Goodman, she would have stolen the show. As is, she makes a good show of it and leaves you wishing we could see more of Sandra, both bodily and dramatically speaking. 

The casting of Russell as Sandra is vital to the audience's understanding of Richard’s Kelly. The unbridled lust to have whatever they want plays into the tension sparked by Kelly's accusations against Sam. The ensuing investigation kicks off the rollercoaster ride of betrayal and plot twists, which make up Wild Things. 

The third member of the horny trio is 90s screen icon Neve Campbell as Suzie. It’s no secret I’m a melon felon, but Neve Campbell does something to me. An embodiment of BTE (Big Tit Energy), with sumptuous, kissable lips you can't wait to see wrapped around the neck of a champagne bottle, Campbell may not be the kind of woman you see on dorm room posters, but she nonetheless exudes a raw sensuality that leaves you hypnotized.

Suzie is the ultimate poor girl from the wrong side of the tracks. A grungy smoke show, Suzie's eyes threaten to devour everyone she looks at. Part of why I called this site the gaze is because I think people get trapped into thinking “sexy” is one thing. 

But one look at Campbell in those Doc Martens cut-off jeans, and a full tank-top with bra showing, and that long, graceful throat- Christ on a cracker, how could you not catch yourself staring? Among the many things Wild Things did was awaken things in an entire generation. It’s a movie that launched countless puberties, regardless of gender and sexuality.

Wild Things is filmed through a bisexual gaze, as there’s something for everyone. More than that, McNaughton and Jefferey Kimball's lens gaze at their characters with contemplative scrutiny. The erotic haze of the film encompasses all genders, all shapes, and all sizes. Everyone feels a little too relaxed or a little too wound up, the mood heightened, so every interaction feels like a hiss should escape after every scene.

Infamously, there’s even a brief full-frontal Keven Bacon, penis and all, in the shower. Bacon’s asshole cop, Ray Duquette, is a hot slice of assholery. Bacon and Dillon are perfect foils as they spend the film having one long dick measuring contest. That each character feels like a mirror-verse version of the other is part of the panoply of joys packed into McNaughton's sleazy little masterpiece. 

But what’s important is that the film has a personality. Impressively, McNaughton, a director who has never wielded that much personality, favoring the dogma that content dictates form, his debut feature, the unsettling cult classic Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, gives himself fully to the act of voyeurism. As he did with Henry, the aspect of looking, of being a peeping Tom, is key to what makes so much of Wild Things so titillating and absorbing. McNaughton and Kimball add a tease of the taboo, making Wild Things feel as if we shouldn't be watching. 

Peters’s script is brilliant in the way it plays it one hundred percent straight, while never taking itself all that seriously. He plots Wild Things within an inch of its life but never gets lost in exposition. Something that’s helped by how editor Elena Maganini and McNaughton leap from scene to scene, skipping the parts we’re used to seeing. The film religiously adheres to one of Elmore Leonard’s infamous edicts: Try to leave out parts that the readers tend to skip.  

The sex and sleaze in Wild Things come from how McNaughton uses Kimball’s camera to frame and build the psychological tensions and buried desires threatening to boil over. Kimball is the secret sauce as to why Wild Things feels so breathless and sweaty.

Kimball does such an effective job of building sexual tension that it's easy to forget that the iconic threesome scene between Richards, Dillion, and Campbell, while achingly hot, is brief. The buildup of the scene is longer than the actual act. Though anyone who complains of seeing Denise Richards's perfect tits groped and bathed in champagne with Campbell and Dillon feasting on the surgical wonders, should check themselves into the nearest mental hospital stat. I hope her plastic surgeon never pays for a drink as long as he lives.

McNaughton, Kimball, and Maganini set the tempo of the scene and take time to set the sexual tension so that the explosion feels like a mini climax, narratively and physically. Kimball's camera focuses on things like the knot of Kelly's top, Sam's hands fiddling with the knot, Suzie's lips supping the champagne off Kelly's juicy melons as if she might die of thirst. All with George S. Clinton's almost pornographic score pushing the eroticism into overdrive.

McNaugton uses the sex scene as a release valve. The real tension is watching the drama unfold, while he turns up the heat, keeping our pulses racing. You’ve likely seen the GIF of Denise Richards emerging from the pool, dripping with sex and chlorine, in a pale blue one-piece swimsuit. But what the GIF doesn’t show is how McNaughton and Kimball build to the moment, how they use the camera to build anticipation within the audience.

Kimball fills the frame with light blue pool water, the sun glistening off the surface, Richard's swimming towards the camera. Naturally, she’s doing the breaststroke. The camera holds onto Richard’s as the camera pans to the right, and a pool ladder comes into frame. They're hinting at what’s about to happen; visually creating tension.

Richards’s manicured hands grasp the wet, hard steel and erupts from the pool in slow motion. She pauses on the first step, her swollen breasts straining against the tight material so hard we can see the outlines of her areolas and nipples. Every frame a painting, indeed!

Richards then does what every screen siren since the silent era has done and flips her hair. A simple yet mysteriously potent erotic act that never fails to leave men and women swooning. Her glorious ta-tas are teasingly visible through the material. It's a jaw-tightening sight.

By itself, this would be enough to leave an audience sweaty-palmed and dry-mouthed. But McNaughton and Kimball aren’t done. The camera holds on Richards as she emerges from the pool, then quickly pans down to her feet, merely so we can get a slow pan up her toned, chlorine-soaked body in that blue one-piece that is in no way meets Blue Bay High regulations. (Thank God!) 

The craftsmanship of Wild Things is what makes it go down so easily. Little things like framing Russell on the balcony, perfectly above the front door, with Kelly standing underneath the balcony. The two characters are parallel versions of each other. The scene ends with both going inside at the same time, both the front door and the balcony door closing at the same time. 

Or the catfight in the pool between Kelly and Suzie. Holy hell, talk about a scene that activated something inside of me. The scene is part of a longer sex scene that was cut, possibly because it was too gay for the times.

Maganini cuts the catfight not as an act of explosive violence but as an act of explosive desire, two women unsure what to do with these roiling lusts inside of them and acting out the only way they can. I know a great many men and women who grew up in the 90s who would gladly volunteer to be slapped by Denise Richards and called a "cunt", myself included. 

Duquette watches from the bushes, camera rolling, as McNaughton indulges in the voyeuristic aspect of the form. We’re watching them being watched by Duquette, elevating the tension; we’re seeing something we’re not supposed to. 

It doesn’t hurt that Maganini and Kimball find time to frame Richards’s heaving bosom during the fight. Her tits fill the frame as she dunks Campbell's head. Among its many attributes, Wild Things understands the cleavage aesthetic as a seasoning.

While the cat-fight scene starts violently erotic, it soon turns tender. Kelly pulls Suzie to the pool steps, then holds her by the waist, cradling her legs as she positions herself between her thighs, and comforts her before the two share a kiss so hot I’m shocked I didn’t pass out in theaters. If nothing else, Wild Things reminds us that aftercare is important. 

The women of Wild Things, while sexualized, are never objectified. Our first impressions of them are skewed and often wrong. Suzie is smarter and more self-reliant than we're led to believe, and Kelly is more scared and confused than she appears. The two actors spark off each other, making every scene feel combustible and dangerous.

Wild Things pulsates with life as the soundtrack, filled with 90s pop songs and blaring sax solos, refuses to ever let the audience out of its grip. Every member of the cast plays their role at exactly the right pitch, every frame oozes with a thin veneer of sleaze, and the whole time you can’t help but wonder if someone’s turned up the thermostat.

Images courtesy of Columbia Pictures