I first saw a picture of Fred Olen Ray many years ago, as a teenager. Given its genre (an erotic thriller) and my age, it is logical to assume that I was primarily interested not in the detective component of the film, but in what the authors meant by the word “erotic”. I safely forgot who mutused who there and for what almost immediately after watching, but the female images were remembered and, as they say, left vivid impressions.
I don’t always watch movies twice, but selective memory told me that this opus could be looked at in one eye. Which I did. To be honest, I was extremely disappointed. First, a nightmare. Secondly, the properties of human memory, which weeds out all the bad, leaving only positive emotions on the surface. However, at the stage of the plot description, you will understand why I say this.
... In a typical suburb of Los Angeles, a two-story house lives respectable insurer Baxter Reed (Joseph Bottoms) with his wife Jennifer (Valery Wildman). The family life of Bucks and Jenny is not going well. The husband is often away from work, and his wife reasonably suspects him of cheating with a young and attractive assistant Anna (Margot Hemingway). Tired of endless suspicion, a childless housewife decides to end her life by taking a horse dose of sleeping pills. But the poor girl “did not try”, and in an attempt to get to the second floor collapsed down the stairs, as a result of which her legs failed.
Bucks, you could say, is happy. Now he can safely make sorties to his mistress, without fear that his wife will suddenly rush to work in a wheelchair. Being savvy in the subject, the husband insured Jenny for a large amount in advance, but will receive it only in the event of an accident or violent death. In order to equip the first, he hires a sexy nurse Lynn with a dubious past (Tania Roberts). The agreement is simple: the nurse convinces the wife of the innocence of her husband while he plots.
Of course, the insidious plans of Bucks were not destined to come true, because Jenny always sticks his nose where he should not. Which makes sense. She wants to live. She soon discovers that Lynn is not who she claims to be. The husband’s behavior has long been suspicious. In the final, this trio will converge to resolve the sore property problems, and at the same time send someone to the forefathers.
In March of this year, I already reviewed one of the works of Fred Olen Ray (“Queen of Scream in the Jacuzzi”), on the basis of which I made very deplorable conclusions about the “talents” of this director. “Secrets of the soul” did not shake my opinion about him. The most interesting thing is that both films were released in 1991. As well as three other paintings of similar obscene quality. Ray’s performance is not surprising, because all his projects are not just low-budget, but also extremely meager in detail. The same "Secrets of the Soul" were filmed in three interiors - the office of the insurance company, the veranda near the house where the main characters live and, in fact, the house itself.
Mysteries of the Soul is a true example of how not to shoot thrillers. In general, this quiet horror even a thriller can be called with a great stretch. Because it's clear from the start who the victim is and who the villain is. The intrigue, according to the authors, is how many times the loving Bucks will have time to sleep with all the women around him before his faithful in the finale beats him with a garden shovel. You'll excuse me for showing you all the cards like that. Just hope that after reading this review, you will not even come close to this film.
The script is, to put it mildly, idiotic. The question is, if the main character was so eager to help his frigid wife to throw away the skates, why the hell did he not fulfill his desire at the very moment when she crashed down the stairs? Why was it necessary to play this whole show with a disabled wife, hire a dragging porn star as a nurse, and even more so throw your colleague out of the window? It seems that the writers were dullly given timekeeping and asked to fill the film with at least some dialogue. So the characters wander from frame to frame, asking a friend stupid questions and getting appropriate answers.
Acting isn't much better. Who Bottoms and Wildman are, you may not even remember. What’s interesting is that there are two female roles, Anna’s assistant and Lynn’s caregiver, won by Margot Hemingway and Tanya Roberts, respectively. Margot is the granddaughter of Hemingway. She, by the way, starred in the sequel to the film, released in 1994. And two years later, she committed suicide following the example of the character Jenny, swallowing sedatives.
Tanya Roberts, going in the credits first - the only nominal star of the film. In the mid-eighties, she surfaced abruptly on the wave of success of the adventure picture “The Tyre is the Queen of the Jungle” and the next Bond film “A View to Kill”. After that, the actress was somehow forgotten and on the set of “Sacres of the Soul” she arrived as a “hit pilot”. It seems to be a well-known name, but no one is interested. At that time, the actress was 35, she still looked spectacular and actively twisted her breasts and thighs in the frame, since all these parts of her body were present in the right proportions.
You may ask, what about eroticism? When I watched it again, it was much more modest than I had imagined at a young age. Hemingway’s granddaughter, the filmmakers managed to strip only partially, so the main blow was taken by the uninhibited (and what was she to lose?). Roberts. Filmed all the rare love scenes in the traditional lubricated style of Playboy, when the characters do not have sex, and lying dancing Macarena. It, of course, the creators know better how to stack the characters, but it looks at least funny, and at most stupid.
Verdict: The doubts are confirmed. A very weak thriller with rare intersperses of pretty bodies in lace underwear and without it. In place of the authors, I would not even bother with a detective story, but would reduce the picture to a digestible 10-15 minutes of an erotic clip under dreary blues. I have no idea how the producers were able to film the continuation of this crap, but there is a suspicion that the plot of the sequel has nothing to do with the original. Unless the hero of Bottoms, scored in the final with a shovel, did not come to life and began in the form of zombies to destroy his former girlfriends. At least, such a development would greatly revive the picture.
2 out of 10