# Wild Things (1998)

### reviewed by
Scott Renshaw

WILD THINGS (1998) (Columbia) Starring: Matt Dillon, Kevin Bacon, Neve Campbell, Denise Richards, Bill Murray, Theresa Russell. Screenplay: Stephen Peters. Producers: Steven A. Jones and Rodney M. Liber. Director: John McNaughton. MPAA Rating: R (adult themes, sexual situations, nudity, profanity, drug use, violence) Running Time: 113 minutes. Reviewed by Scott Renshaw.

If Hollywood is going to insist on making awful films, the least it could do is make them as wonderfully, hilariously awful as WILD THINGS. There is a kind of Zen preposterousness certain films achieve -- oh, let's use SHOWGIRLS as an example -- which makes them too much fun to dismiss. They become impromptu "Mystery Science Theater" experiences, where you find yourself hooting and commenting throughout the ridiculous situations, plaster-of-Paris acting and quotably appalling dialogue.

I'm not entirely sure that WILD THINGS isn't a huge, self-aware joke, attempting to combine the Joe Eszterhas oeuvre (SHOWGIRLS, BASIC INSTINCT, JADE) and grade-Z exploitation films bursting with busty women in the swamps. The plot begins with a South Florida high school guidance counselor named Sam Lombardo (Matt Dillon) who finds himself accused of rape by two of his students: pouty, flirtatious rich-girl cheerleader Kelly (Denise Richards), and wrong-side-of-the-tracks, tattooed, pot-smoking trouble-maker Susie (Neve Campbell). For the next 100 minutes or so it spins off into a dozen different twists and turns of double-dealing, accompanied by the kind of non-stop sleaze which would make Eszterhas proud. Soap opera threats snarled through clenched teeth? Yep. Career-threatening performances? You betcha. Chicks in cat fights? Check. Chicks in wet T-shirts? Check. Chicks making out with each other? Double-check. Gratuitous full-frontal shower shot of Detective Ray Duquette (Kevin Bacon) which reveals -- ahem -- just precisely how many degrees of Kevin Bacon there are? Double-double-check.

And yet, as undeniably wretched as virtually every moment of WILD THINGS is, I can't imagine anyone walking out on it. The same kind of perverse I-only-read-it-for-the-articles voyeurism which finds otherwise sensible people pausing when they flip past Jerry Springer could have you shaking your head and giggling non-stop. In fact, the pseudo-serious but scandal-grubbing television coverage of Lombardo's trial in WILD THINGS serves as an apt metaphor for what we should be expecting from the film. There's no way to take WILD THINGS seriously as a movie, any more than it's possible to take "Melrose Place" seriously as topical drama or "Hard Copy" seriously as journalism. It's a lowest-common-denominator side show of all the stuff we mock with knee-jerk superiority, yet still manages to do gangbuster ratings.

It is only a tremendously entertaining supporting turn by Bill Murray which makes it hard to forgive WILD THINGS all its trespasses. As Lombardo's ambulance-chasing attorney, Murray brings a genuine comic touch to the proceedings, one which doesn't force you to stop laughing to figure out whether the humor is intentional. When Murray's loose, confident work exists alongside the ham-fisted conniving of Kelly's nasty mother (Theresa Russell) and a smug member of the town elite (Robert Wagner), any possible sense of planned parody vanishes. Even the film's extended closing credits coda, which back-tracks to explain how all the plotting comes together, feels like a huge miscalculation. If it matters that much whether or not the plot makes sense, then WILD THINGS really _is_ that bad.

Perhaps it's just the eternal optimist in me which makes me want to believe there was a logic behind the perverse inanity -- or perhaps that's inane perversity -- of WILD THINGS. Or perhaps it's the need to find a reason why I'd rather sit through a film as bad as WILD THINGS again before I'd sit through a "better" film like TWILIGHT. I can't even call it a "guilty pleasure," because it's not the film I enjoyed. I did, however, immensely enjoy the act of _not_ enjoying it. Start-to-finish trash just doesn't get much trashier than this, unless a certain writer's name is attached to the script. Somewhere, very soon, Joe Eszterhas will be watching WILD THINGS and kicking himself because he didn't write it first.

         On the Renshaw scale of 0 to 10 THINGS that go bomb:  3.

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