Body of Evidence (1993)

After watching William Friedkin's Jade (1995) recently, a nineties erotic thriller that faced an assault from the critics but I thought to be perfectly serviceable, the time felt right to sit down to watch Uli Edel's equally kicked about entry into the genre. Starring Madonna of all people as the femme fatale character who hires Willem Dafoe's lawyer after she's accused of murdering her lover for wealth, Body of Evidence is an absurd and laughable thriller, whose sex scenes make the swimming pool scene in Showgirls (1995) look like the most serious cinematic sequence of the twentieth century. Dafoe looks baffled throughout the film; whether that's because of the hideousness of what's happening around him or simply down to the stupidity of the character he's playing is unclear, but one can only assume he took the paycheck for Edel's film well before he read the script. To call Body of Evidence a poor man's Basic Instinct is akin to parking a turd on every hard copy of Basic Instinct that still exists (I've got a 4K collectors edition that I'm particularly proud of); Madonna's ludicrous lake house doesn't appear to be making any sort of attempt to discern it from Sharon Stone's abode in Paul Verhoeven's genre stamping film, and Dafoe's character is simply a more stupid version of Michael Douglas' detective, without the scintillating fury and desperation. Madonna is dreadful; this was no surprise to me considering the only time I personally have seen her on screen was the 2002 James Bond outing Die Another Day in which she's execrably pointless (that's a good gag if you know the scene she's in) but I have heard she has been half decent on screen before- I simply haven't seen that yet. As an erotic thriller, and considering it gives us next to nothing in the rest of the film, Body of Evidence's sex scenes needed to add up to something. Sadly, they're arguably the worst thing in the film. During the first sexual encounter between Madonna and Dafoe, she pours boiling candle wax and champagne on his body, culminating in a meeting between some wax and Dafoe's genitals. By the time the scene had got to that stage I was considering pouring boiling wax on my own genitals, just to have something less ludicrous to concentrate on. The plot of the film is essentially Basic Instinct as we've already established, so from the first few minutes we more or less know how it's going to end and by the time that sex finishes, you're almost praying that they don't enter into that sort of nonsense for the rest of the feature. Obviously that's not the case, and we have to witness Dafoe repeatedly cheat on his wife (Julianne Moore, who has since voiced her regret over her own nude scene in it) with an out of control Madonna. It's impossible to care about the characters on show, they garotte any sentience of feeling we didn't have in the first place for the story, and every time there's a court room scene, you're supposed to be shocked at the revelations being unveiled, but all you want is for someone to give Dafoe's character a firm slap across the face to snap him out of the sexual haze of stupidity that's engulfed him since his first encounter with Madonna. A smart script is vital for an erotic thriller, and Body of Evidence provides one that could have been penned by an inanimate sex toy from Madonna's own collection (I have no knowledge of such a collection just to be clear) -that's also broken. It's drivel from start to finish, and makes Jade look like a masterpiece of cinema, let alone one of the sub genre. 2.9/10