

Exhibit B: Erotic Thrillers: Erotic thrillers enjoyed a moment between Basic Instinct and Showgirls. She certainly gives a better performance than Anne Archer. Also, she really isn't bad in this movie considering the lines she is given. We are not inundated with Madonna nowadays (naked or otherwise) so she seems fresh again. "You think there are men in this country who ain't seen your bosoms?" What a difference twenty-six years makes. As Rosie O'Donnell said to her in A League of Their Own. People were buying $50 coffee books that consisted if nothing but pictures of her naked while hitchhiking.

The Defense: Exhibit A: Madonna: In 1992 naked Madonna was everywhere. The prosecution is feeling a bit overconfident there and rested their case without mentioning Anne Archer's performance or the horrifying screenplay.

Exhibit C: Madonna: Madonna makes bad movies. Both are wonderful charismatic actors but nobody wants to see William Defoe's O face. Yes, he's wearin' that dumb Power Rangers maskīut he's scarier without it on Now If William Defoe switched roles with Joe Mantegna as the prosecutor that might have worked a lot better. Defoe in his song "Ode To A Superhero"Īnd he's ridin' around on that glider thingĪnd he's throwin' that weird pumpkin bomb But as the lead character in an erotic thriller? As Weird Al Yankovic wrote about Mr. Exhibit B: William Defoe: I genuinely like William Defoe. The judge allows so many shenanigans that she makes Judge Ito look like Judge Judy. The scenes here are pointless with half a dozen side characters introduced and then forgotten. Now courtroom scenes can work in thrillers (see 1990's Presumed Innocent), but they should be to the point and thrilling. However, it spends an amazing amount of time in the courtroom. Body of Evidence is often considered an erotic thriller. The case for the Prosecution: Exhibit A: The courtroom scenes: AKA half the bloody movie. Will her lawyer get her off? Will she get him off? Stay tuned for the drama both inside and outside of the courtroom.
#Body of evidence movie online trial#
Willem Dafoe, a particularly fine actor when the script takes him and sometimes when it doesn't, is here treading water, desperately out of his depth, grinning like a Cheshire cat on heat, whether he's humping his wife ("You're great when you've got a big case," she moans) or having his head stuffed into Madonna's crotch (no stand-ins here) while she's posed on the bonnet of a limo.Body of Evidence: 7 out of 10: A woman is on trial for seducing men to death. The main problem here, however, is that whereas Basic Instinct - which this tries so desperately to emulate - had a healthy dose of self-deprecating humour (you always felt director Paul Verhoeven's tongue was well embedded in his cheek), Body Of Evidence takes itself far too seriously, its actors spouting Brad Mirman's stilted dialogue with the stony-faced sincerity of people wishing they were somewhere else altogether.Īnd while Madonna is constantly presented as a beautiful young woman of mystery, the fact is that here she looks far from young, far from beautiful and - for anyone who checked out the previous year's literary offering, Sex - very far from mysterious. "That's what I do - I fuck," she purrs at one point, just in case we don't quite get it. With defence lawyer Willem Dafoe on her case, what follows is a courtroom drama of mounting tedium interspersed by scenes of Madonna pouring hot candle wax over Dafoe's chest and genitalia, and masturbating with Enya-like musak twinkling away in the background.

After a bout of strenuous sex involving bondage and nipple clamps, he winds up dead from a cardiac arrest, leaving district attorney Joe Mantegna to bring in Madonna for her lover's murder, claiming she, er, fornicated him to death - "she's the murder weapon" - aided by a dash of cocaine in his nasal spray, for the $8 million she's set to inherit in his will. La Ciccone is art gallery owner Rebecca Carlson who lives on an impossibly lavish and improbably stable houseboat, and has a rich older lover with a dodgy ticker. The subject of much derision at the time, Madonna's offering arrived on these shores having flopped across the pond, but no doubt hoping to bask in the glow of a Basic Instinct-style sexual controversy.
