Wild Things at 25

Wild Things turns 25 this week!  Let me tell you a story about the best time I ever had in a theatre.

My roommate really wanted to go see Wild Things.  “It’s our generation’s Fatal Attraction!” she said.  I did not want to go see this movie.  Everything about it looked mediocre.

From all the advertising, it looked like it was going to be another piece of mid 90s Sleeze, Sex & Violence thriller bubble, where dangerous women lure unsuspecting men to their doom; the kind of movie you’d rent only if Blockbuster was already out of Fatal Attraction, The Crush, Disclosure, and Basic Instinct.

There was also kind of a mid 90s “we just found about about Carl Hiassen” bubble, which resulted in a bunch of vaguely noir-ish movies set in florida.  (See also: Striptease.)

And, who was in it?  Matt Dillon, who was mostly “no, not the guy from 90210, the guy from The Outsiders.  No, the other one. No, the OTHER one,” four months out from Something About Mary.  Neve Campbell, who was still mostly “the girl from Party of Five.” Denise Richards, who was still mostly “the girl from Starship Troopers.”  Kevin Bacon?  Not a great 90s track record, but sure.  Bill Murray, who was still six months away from relighting his career with Rushmore, still in the “funny cameo in Ed Wood” phase.

A cast that looks way better in retrospect than at the time, but in context a sort of vaguely b-list talent in what looked like a vaguely b-list knockoff of a Verhoeven Movie.   Everything about it had the quality of a movie everyone knocked out over the summer between “real” projects.  Make a couple of bucks, take a nice vacation to Florida.  Sure!  No judgement!  Everyone has bills to pay.

I made this argument.  We went to go see the movie opening weekend.

[Spoilers ahoy, I guess?]

And the first 20-30 minutes of the movie play exactly like you expect.  Two high school girls, one “rich/hot”, one “poor/goth”.  Dorky guidance counselor.  Maybe something happens?  Maybe consensual, maybe not?  Rape accusation.  The movie is  running the standard playbook.  You could basically set your watch by the plot beats you were expecting.

Except.

The whole thing is just a little bit better than it ought to be.  The camera work is intertesting.  The music by George Clinton is way better than you’d expect, generating this haunting swamp-noir vibe.  Bill Murray shows up and demonstrates why he’s months out from a whole second act of his career.  All the actors are doing more careful nuanced work than it seems like they ought to be.  The whole thing demonstrates a level of care that a schlocky knockoff shouldn’t have.

And then it turns into a totally different movie.

With absolute confidence, the movie trusts the audience has seen all the same movies that it’s seen, and then winks and swerves out into a whole different thing, turning into a twisty, intricately plotted web of quadruple crosses where everyone is up to three more things than you thought they were.

I remember this mounting sense of glee as the movie suddenly wasn’t what I expected, and then kept going, careening into more and more interesting places that I imagined.

This all continues right through the end, when the movie delivers what’s still the best set of post-credit stingers of any movie, putting the whole set of events into new light.  It’s phenomenal.

Hands down, the most any movie has ever exceeded my expectations.  So much fun to have a movie pretend to be something else in the marketing, and then turn into a different movie.

It doesn’t seem to come up that often; I suspect the marketing worked against it, and has slipped out of memory.  An under-appreciated gem from the late 90s.  Happy Birthday!