Exposure

2000

Miriama Smith film clip (collage below)

Susan Pari film clip (collages below)

Exposure is a 2000 thriller where reclusive Gary (Ron Silver), a former war photographer haunted by the death of his girlfriend (Miriama Smith), finds a naked woman entangled in nets in his boat shed. It is Elaine (Susan Pari), who ended up in the boat shed after she jumped off the boat to get away from her abusive boyfriend. Gary helps her out and Elaine comes back to return the clothes he gave her and notices that he's has a bunch of sexy photos he's shot and Elaine is interested and they decide to do a quick photo shoot. Gary shows it to his friend Paul (Paul Gittins) and he's impressed and gets Gary to do another photo shoot with Elaine for his 'sophisticated' men's magazine IQ, which she agrees to. It's a hit but then Elaine finds herself with unwarranted attention which she puts down to her shitty boyfriend and boss Brad (Timothy Balme) until Gary finds her dead when he becomes concerned about her safety. So, it was probably Brad, but then Paul is attacked after Gary goes to talk to him and finds Paul canoodling with a model. Paul's wife Jackie (Alexandra Paul) takes comfort with Gary and Paul catches them just as they kiss and Paul thinks Gary is 'cutting his grass' after he found Paul with the model. Anyway, no problem, Paul is murdered and there's a message about an unholy trinity, so someone is going to kill a third part and it very much looks like Gary is going to be the final victim. But who is the killer and can it be the most unlikely person who you never know about until a dumbarse priest (Kevin J. Wilson) manages to work it out?

Silly murder-mystery that picks the killer out of a hat and the answer is near impossible to predict but the dumbarse priest works it out, only to get slaughtered in the most obvious way. Directed by David Blyth (Death Warmed Up, Wound, Ghost Bride, Angel Mine), no stranger to genre movies made for the American market, this movie just gets sillier by-the-minute. Ron Silver is strangely subdued and Alexandra Paul is barely in the movie until the second half where her character is hamfistedly brought together with Silver's for the ridiculous ending. Miriama Smith doesn't have much to do, playing a token South American (!) woman in her underwear or less who's has sex with Silver's character, who's has a mullet in these scenes. The movie never gets out of second gear and is probably best watched for the smatterings of nudity throughout. Good luck finding it though as I bought this on DVD over ten years ago and finally gotten around to capping it.

Skin and Bone

2003

Charmaine Guest film clip (sample below)

To end with, I found the 2003 TV movie Skin And Bone on the NZ OnScreen site, took a quick look and was surprised to see it had a sex/nude scene, so I decided to take a closer look. Turns out that the movie is a standard country boy (Antony Starr, who I know from Outrageous Fortune but you probably know him better from The Boys and Banshee) who's about to make it big in the city who gets the rug pulled from under him and heads back home to play in the final game of the season for his old home town rugby team, which is falling apart. Except this is one of the more darker interpretations of this, actually it's incredibly fucked. One of the old team is a total psychopath who when he's not trying to knock out his captain, gets the country boy's city girlfriend drunk and forces another bloke to rape her while she's passed out. Well, the final game is an incredibly grim experience. The psychopath kicks the captain in the head and a fair amount of time goes into the local doctor (well I think he was...) thinking about drilling a hole in the captain's head. Anyway, the captain dies, the team is still 2 tries down and the country boy has walked away while the coach (Roy Billing playing Roy Billing at 200%) is sulking in the dressing room after finding out about the psychopath. Can they win the shield, give the town hope and have the most fucked ending in sporting history? Yes, probably not and pretty much. The climatic game is one of the grimmest things I've ever seen in a movie. Plus there's a whole bunch of graphic male shower scenes in the first 10 minutes and an underwear fashion parade which suggest a rather homoerotic element to the movie I wasn't expecting. Truly bizarre stuff... If you want, you can watch it for free on the NZOnScreen site but don't say I didn't warn you and don't mind the PG rating it is listed as on the site. Ha ha ha...