BODY SHOT

OO-ER, MISSUS. CONTAINS SPOILERS

Sometimes I kind of miss the dumb noir-erotic thrillers that flowered in the mid-1990s after Basic Instinct, Sliver and Body Of Evidence - the likes of Night Rhythms and Animal Instincts, in which some kind of ludicrously elaborate murder plot was interrupted by softcore bouncing and the occasional familiar B-movie regular (David Carradine, Maxwell Caulfield, Jan-Michael Vincent) prodding the story along. Many of them were very silly and existed only to show lots of glamourous looking skin without veering into hardcore territory but were at their best reasonably amusing and glossily shot. Obviously not all of them - some were astonishingly cheap and ugly (incidentally with some tragically unsuccessful boob jobs on display).

At one point the Blockbusters and Choices video chains were deluged with this sort of stuff and somehow I never managed to see Body Shot, which is pretty typical of its genre although with a bit less indiscriminate humping than usual. It uses the old noir trope of a dumb but hunksome loser innocently drawn into a convoluted murder scheme by a brazen hussy of a femme fatale then left to take the fall - in the case pap photographer Robert Patrick, in debt and almost ruined after being hit with a restraining order by a reclusive rock icon known as Chelsea. Out of nowhere a high-paying job materialises, involving studio sessions with a Chelsea-lookalike (Michelle Johnson): it's not long before they're at it like knives, even when one of the sessions involves pictures of her staged death. Lo and behold: the real girl is then found murdered in exactly the same way and Patrick can't prove his innocence....

It's all pretty lame, especially the chases and the fight scenes, and apart from the boobs and bums in the bonking scenes it could play on TV quite comfortably. Good to see the likes of Ray Wise and Charles Napier showing up as well. But it does rely on Patrick's character being an absolute idiot for almost the whole movie with a complete blindspot for the plot machinations whirling all around him. It passes 93 minutes of an evening, but that's all.

**

Available here, FWIW: