LADY BEWARE

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

Here's yet another late 1980s top-shelf sex thriller which seems to have dropped through the distribution cracks from the genre's VHS glory days and which now looks to have vanished. In truth that's not entirely surprising because it's a whole bunch of not very good: an amusing and enjoyable enough mixture of glossy softcore and psycho ranting, but it's illogical, contrived, far too long and has a body count of zero. It's a pity that the only source appears to be a YouTube upload from a VHS tape: a decent quality would DVD would look a lot better.

Lady Beware kicks off with Diane Lane landing a job as a radical window dresser for a huge department store, where she immediately starts creating outlandish and kinky tableaux with scantily clad dummies and whipped cream. Despite being apparently jobless up to this point, she's living in the kind of enormous loft apartment you could exercise horses in: a prime two acres of real estate that even the Sultan of Brunei would probably have to ask for a discount on the rental. Unfortunately, her window displays have attracted the attention of the X-ray technician and revolting pervert across the road, who breaks into her apartment, steals her mail, makes dirty phone calls, and even has sex with her clothing at one point, which I'm pretty certain isn't a recommended seduction technique. If only he'd leave a massive clue to his identity so that she could easily track him down and end the nightmare....

This is precisely the sort of sleazy "erotic thriller" that would come out in the wake of Basic Instinct a few years later: that kind of tacky but not actually pornographic romp that A Gregory Hippolyte (a pseudonym for porn director Greg Dark) would make his own with absurd shagathons like Night Rhythms and Animal Instincts. It's reasonably glossy to look at, the score is all tinkling electric pianos and sultry sax, and while it's got enough nudity to get it an 18 certificate it generally stays reasonably discreet. But it's too long, too silly, and the psycho doesn't even bother to raise the stakes by killing anyone. Mostly rubbish.

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