Slamdance (1987) is a thriller/comedy from director Wayne Wang. It stars Tom Hulce as a cartoonist separated from his wife and young daughter. He is suddenly accused of murdering a woman he had an affair with, and more than just the police are after him. He has to figure out exactly why he is being framed for this murder, and later, a second one, while eluding the police and the "other" bad guys. The plot is a little muddled in spots, and I am not sure even now I understand the entire truth behind the murders, but not of that matters. We have Lisa Niemi (Mrs. Patrick Swayze) doing lengthy full frontal in perfect lighting. She would have been 30 when this picture was filmed, and her background as a dancer is evident in her tight body. She has also worked as a choreographer, director, and is working with her husband currently on Dirty Dancing 2. This may be the best non-sexual nudity I have seen in a film to date.

IMDB readers have this at 4.8 of 10. Ebert awards 2 stars, and complains that the plot got in the way of some fine actors. It doesn't work as a thriller, mostly as there is no build-up of tension, but has many entertaining moments, great nudity from Niemi, and Virginia Madsen and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio looking great even with their clothes on. The cinematography is very nice, and the DVD contains both the wide screen theatrical version, and a full negative 4/3 version, which has more nudity. All in all, this is a C-.

Half Moon Street (1986)

This is a political thriller with Michael Caine and Sigourney Weaver. Caine plays someone named Lord Bulbeck, despite speaking with his usual working class accent. (His idiolect is explained by something about an adventurer father with an eyepatch, and a childhood spent at the race track.) The "Lord" is attempting to use his international contacts and respect to broker some kind of Mideast peace settlement.

Sigourney Weaver plays a Harvard Ph.D. who is working in a Middle-East think tank in London for £150 per week. She finds that she can't make ends meet, so she does what most geniuses in her position would do. She becomes a high priced hooker - using her real name, and making nice-nice with the same people that she gives lectures to during the day. Needless to say one of her clients eventually turns out to be Lord Bulbeck himself, and ... well, a romance is born.

Meanwhile, because she is so upfront about what she does during her days and nights, some evil guys figure out that she's Lord Bulbeck's mistress. Some British security guys also figure it out, and so Sig and the Lord play out their sex acts in front of various binoculars and surveillance cameras.

As a political thriller, this is a very weak film, for two main reasons:

1. For 55 minutes, the audience is unaware that it is a thriller at all. Absolutely nothing seems to point in that direction. The script does eventually use many of the elements from this table-setting stage of the film, but there is a lot of tedium to crunch before the film appears to have any point.

2. When the film ends, the audience does not know what has happened, or why. The film ends abruptly after a violent shoot out. During the film we have been aware that some people have been watching Sig and the Lord, and we think it must be some evil Arab dudes who oppose a peace settlement and the British secret service, who are simply protecting the good Lord, but we aren't sure. In fact, the film suggests that the real bad guys may actually be a powerful cabal called The 5000, who run the entire world with economic power and contacts. Whoever was trying to kill Lord Bulbeck, there is absolutely no reason given. So we end with a shoot-out at Sig's place between some anonymous good guys and a bad guy, and then Michael Caine shows up and says he knew nothing about any of it.

He's in the same boat as the rest of us.

So this will not be your cup of tea if you're looking for a slick tale of international intrigue, but it does have some merit as a character study. The Sigourney Weaver character is not credible, but is interesting.

I say she isn't believable because she seems to have watched every movie ever made and to have learned every language ever spoken. There is a rule of compression which applies to various learning feats. In Good Will Hunting, for example, it is possible that a young man can immediately make an intuitive leap of thought in a field like mathematics. It isn't likely, but it is possible. In certain other fields, geniuses can read books and assimilate facts faster than the rest of us. However, there is no way that geniuses can watch movies any faster than the rest of us. It takes us two hours to watch a two hour movie, it takes them the same period of time.

Sigourney's character in this film seems to be about 28 years old. She got her Ph.D. and then spent three years in China, and that's where the film begins. I suppose a true genius would be embarrassed to be older than 25 when collecting a Ph.D. She'd get laughed out of the genius club. I calculate that I have watched about 30,000 movies in my life. (That is way too many, I know). Sigourney, however, seems to know more about movies than I do.  Let's assume she has watched 35,000 movies, at an hour and a half each. In order to do that, she would have had to sit passively with her eyes glued to the movie screen six hours a day, every day, from the time she was three years old. Does that sound to you like the type of behavior you'd expect from a person who has learned to speak every language in the world, is really into lengthy sex sessions,  and is also an extreme fitness buff?

And if she's so smart, how does she get completely hornswaggled by these completely transparent Arab con artists who keep giving her free luxury apartments and lavish presents - no strings attached!

Yeah. Right.

OK, it isn't a realistic character, but let's give the script a little breathing room. Let's assume that she isn't supposed to be a real person, but a superhero like Spiderman, with powers beyond mortal ability. And her failure to suspect that her expensive presents are all bugged? Well, that's a kryptonite thing. Given that generous assumption, you may be able to enjoy the relationship between Weaver and Caine. They are a couple of pros who bring their unique charms to their characters. Sig is intense, thoughtful, quick-thinking. Caine is gentle, soft-spoken, gentlemanly. Together they managed to do the best with the weak script they were handed, and they convinced me that they were two people genuinely in love, not just interested in the sex, but completely enthralled with each other's minds.

Unfortunately, the film doesn't give them nearly enough time to engage one another meaningfully. One or the other is always missing an appointment or petulantly refusing to answer phone calls, and when they do get together they spend altogether too much time arguing about his smoking.

The film makes you wish you could reunite the cast and crew back in 1986, and do it all over again with a more thoughtful and coherent script.

I'm not likely to get any awards from feminist groups for my sensitive understanding and treatment of women's issues, but even I found this film to present women in an unflattering light. Every other female character is a half-wit, and the Sigourney character - well, she was described in the feminine viewpoint with suitable distaste by Rita Kempley of the Washington Post.

Dr. Loren Slaughter, we are told, is a woman of the '80s -- jogger, expert in Middle Eastern affairs, call girl. Turn-ons: Perrier with lemon, feminism. Turn-offs: terrorism and smoking. She's a lean, clean good-looker who moonlights for a London escort service to supplement her meager income from a noted research institute.

The DVD: Ya gotta love those two-sided MGM DVD's. The widescreen theatrical version on this DVD is not a very good transfer at all, but flip over to the other side and find the full 35mm negative being used as the full screen version. Not only does it have a crisper picture than the widescreen, but it has Sigourney's full butt and her pubic hair (or something)  in two scenes. Neither exposure can be seen on the widescreen version. The pubes (or crotch patch or whatever that dark area might be) may be seen in collage two, right side.  The full-on butt shot is in collage one.

• Sigourney Weaver (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12)

Twisted Obsession (1990)

Twisted Obsession is also known as El Sueño del mono loco, "The dream of the mad monkey". The Spanish title probably makes more sense, because if insane monkeys dream, their dreams are probably something like this film, although probably lighted better. It's a difficult film for me to relate to, because my most recent monkey ancestors are at least three generations back, and they were all perfectly sane monkeys.

Well, except on my mother's side of the family.

Jeff Goldblum plays a newly-divorced screenwriter who gets locked into a project by a young wunderkind filmmaker and his seductive sister. Goldblum wants out of the project until the sister starts providing him with some oral gratification. Goldblum just hangs around for the blowjobs for a while, but then he becomes obsessed with the sister, and tries to figure out why she has chosen a life as her brother's designated seductress. He never does find out. At one point, he chases her through traffic, and almost dies in an accident. By the time he leaves the hospital, she's gone and nobody knows where, including her distraught brother.

Goldblum's search for her leads him all the way to the Paris morgue. Apparently, he is being led through that morgue in a group, on one of those "walking tours of underground Paris", and some of the other people on the tour are making out, or giggling at the genitals of corpses. Apparently, the Parisians keep all the best corpses in a giant vat of formaldehyde, from which they have to be retrieved with fishing gaffs.

Meanwhile, in some assorted sub-plots, Goldblum's agent (Miranda Richardson) seems to be in a wheelchair which she may not need, ala Guy Caballero on SCTV, and Goldblum's toddler son keeps sinking deeper and deeper into a world of silence until the ex-wife comes along to re-claim him. Or something like that. I may have some of those details wrong, because I kept reaching for the remote, and the blessed FF button.

Even with the worst movies, I can generally find something I like - the cinematography, the nudity, whatever. If the movie is bad enough, it is at least good for some laughs. Not this one. It's confusing, excessively arty, pointless, and morbid. Jeff Goldblum does way too much voice-over narration, which was probably added after the fact, because the film would be incomprehensible without it. The only home media available is a full screen out-of-print VHS which is so artlessly cropped that the entire movie seems like an endless series of facial close-ups. It's just a total misfire.

The main plot is confusing and uninvolving and probably unhealthy. Some sub-plots are marginally relevant and others are left completely unresolved and unexplained. If not for the presence of real actors like Jeff Goldblum and Miranda Richardson, you would swear you are watching an underground film made by some druggies in Washington Square with twenty five bucks and some stolen equipment they bought from a guy with too many body piercings who sells electronics out of the the back of an old van.

Amazingly, this movie was written and directed by Fernando Trueba. I don't know what he could have been thinking of with this flop, because he is a very talented man. Do Trueba a favor and don't watch this. He has directed two excellent Spanish language films that I really like: The Girl of Your Dreams and Belle époque. See those instead.

The nudity is also disappointing. Liza Walker's breast are visible when she is a corpse, as she floats around in a murky liquid. There is a scene which purports to show a close-up of her shaved crotch. This may or may not be her, and it may or may not be a prosthetic. No face is visible, and the camera does not make a smooth pan to the crotch. It goes from her face to Goldblum's face to the alleged crotch.

• Liza Walker (1, 2)

Mailbox:

Scoop. Gentleman Jim here. Here's Cheryl Ladd and Kris Kristofferson in a nude scene at the end of Millennium. No much, but a lot for Cheryl Ladd.

• Ladd (1, 2)

Updates:

• Updated volume: Sigourney Weaver

Other crap:

• A 19-year-old former porn model is running for mayor in a Norwegian town.
• A woman in the US state of Washington has been arrested on "suspicion of hanging topless and upside down from a moving train". It seems a tad surprising to me that such a precisely defined crime is covered by the Washington statutes. It would be better if she were arrested for suspicion of conspiracy to hang topless and upside down from a moving train
• Martha Stewart's indictment
• AFI picks 100 most noble, most vile screen characters. (The #1s- Atticus Finch, Hannibal Lecter)
• a review of Jerry Springer, the Opera
• Holy bobbleheads, Batman
• This little animated .gif is hilarious
• Is Phil Spector nuttier than Vince Gallo? They should have a loony-off. In his first interview since his arrest for the investigation of murder, Spector told Esquire magazine in its upcoming July issue that Clarkson "kissed the gun" before shooting herself.

Here are the latest movie reviews available at scoopy.com.

• The yellow asterisks indicate that I wrote the review, and am deluded into thinking it includes humor.
• If there is a white asterisk, it means that there isn't any significant humor, but I inexplicably determined there might be something else of interest.
• A blue asterisk indicates the review is written by Tuna (or Lawdog or Junior or C2000 or Realist or ICMS or Mick Locke, or somebody else besides me)
• If there is no asterisk, I wrote it, but am too ashamed to admit it.

Today we have Amber Smith in "Crime Scene" aka "Reasonable Doubt" aka "The Baptist".

Amber looks sexy showing breasts in a love scene. My favorites are the images of her with the see thru bra (links 8-10).

• Amber Smith (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11)

Stuck in the hinterlands for a couple of days with nothing but my laptop and hundreds of Tuna caps. Life is sweet.

Ann Dusenberry in Basic Training. In this scene, Ann gets a Ruskie general to give up state secrets by taking off her top. How ridiculous. An American general, maybe, but everyone knows Russians are leg men.

• Ann Dusenberry

Anne Veneziano in some movie about some guy named Patrick who lives in someplace called Ancora. But we get a full frontal from Anne and she's a looker, so I won't complain about the vague directions.

• Anne Veneziano (1, 2)

Carmen Russo, who if memory serves was once a Miss Teen Italy, full-frontal in that same movie about the Patrick fellow.

• Carmen Russo

Thora's mom, Carol Connors, in two Candy movies. You look at Carol, you look at Thora and you realize these melons didn't fall far from the vine.

• Carol Connors, full frontal in "The Erotic Adventures of Candy"
• Carol Connors, topless in in "Candy Goes to Hollywood"

Catherine Fleming, fully frontal from above whilst showering in one of The Hunger episodes.

• Catherine Fleming

My favorites of the whole bunch-- the incredibly edible Charlotte Alexandra in Goodbye Emmanuelle. A triple B performance worthy of two Peabodys, three Oscars and a Nobel prize in medicine or physiology.

• Charlotte Alexandra (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)

Elizabeth Peña and her cute little bod in Jacob's Ladder.

• Elizabeth Peña

Haans Silver, by the pool and topless in Deadly Species. When I saw her name I expected to see "Brinker" and "skates" in the title, but I must have been confused.

• Haans Silver

Isabelle Fortea, showing off boobs and bum, in Marilyn Chambers' Bedtime Stories. I take these bedtime stories don't have silver skates in them, either.

• Isabelle Fortea

Former Hefmate, Jeannie Bell in Policewomen, showing off the kind of nekkid rumpus you just don't see every day. Well, it's the kind I just don't see every day... at least, not anymore.

• Jeannie Bell (1, 2, 3)

And then there is one of the most enigmatic figures in the nekkid celebrity world, Jenny Agutter, in a movie about horses or something.

• Jenny Agutter (1, 2, 3)

Jenny Cox in a movie entitled, Can You Keep it Up For a Week?, subtitled, My Life With Priapus. Just another sophisticated British comedy.

• Jenny Cox

Joan Severance in her glorious prime in Almost Pregnant.

• Joan Severance

Julianne Moore in End of the Affair. This woman is spectacular. Sat next to her on a plane ride from D.C. to L.A. many moons ago and fell in love. You can't tell just how intelligent some people are from movies... I mean, hell, Uma Thurman shows some real wit in Pulp Fiction, but put her on a talk show and you realize she's as dumb as a box of rocks. Julianne, by contrast, is a frigging genius with the best sense of humor on the planet. Woulda sold my mother to the gypies for her.

• Julianne Moore

Kathryn Erbe and Kristina Robbins, both topless, in Dream with the Fishes, which happens I guess only when one sleeps with the fishes.

• Kathryn Erbe
• Kristina Robbins

Lorraine Spaughton getting all topless and showing off a real funny face while sport humpin in Wicked Sins. Which leads to the question, what other kind of sins are there? Just like that movie entitled Forbidden Sins. Is that a redundancy or what? If they're sins, they're pretty well forbidden, yes?

• Lorraine Spaughton

Lynn Lyon, doing the topless harem girl dance routine in Loving Touch.

• Lynn Lyon

Marcha Grant, in a triple B reflective mood in L'Folies de Elodie.

• Marcha Grant

Mia Copia is one extremely impressive fully frontal actress as an Erotic Vampire In Paris. Funny how Paris seems to bring out the lover in everyone.

• Mia Copia (1, 2)

Nina Hoss, who you gotta figure is Dan Blocker's daughter, is also fully frontally nekkid in Das Mädchen Rosemarie.

• Nina Hoss

Patti Tippo, caught in the act with her shirt off but her pants on, in 10 to Midnight.

• Patti Tippo

Long-time soft- and hard-core UK actress, Rene Bond, in Country Cuzzins... which the preferred spelling for those related persons in most parts of Ozarks.

• Rene Bond

Boobs and bum from Samara Ibañez in Deadly Species.

• Samara Ibañez

A topless Sondra Currie in Police Women. The name is familiar, but the face and the bod are entirely foreign to these eyes o' mine.

• Sondra Currie

You get to watch a topless Stevie Cameron dress and undress in the aptly title Tropical Tease.

• Stevie Cameron

And then there is an oh-so-close-to-full-frontal shot from Ursula Karven in Con Express, which is probably a remake of Con Air without the stopover in the Nevada desert. Wouldn't you love to hear Ursula say, "Put the bunny back in the box."

• Ursula Karven (1, 2)

Four Valeries: Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi in C'est la vie, Valerie Hartman in Sleepaway Camp II: Unhappy Campers, Valerie Kaprisky in Breathless and Valerie Quennessen in Summer Lovers. The last Valerie is a full-frontal thing composed to two frames.

• Valerie Bruni-Tedeschi
• Valerie Hartman (1, 2)
• Valerie Kaprisky
• Valerie Quennessen

Victoria Abril in La Colmena offers an entirely novel intrepretation of the statement, "You make me wet."

• Victoria Abril

Okay, now this is the reason I did not refer to Jeannie Bell's caboose as the best of the bunch, because here is Vincenta N'Dongo, bottomless and sporting the kind of chasis that Ferrari does not make. Oh, the movie is called Los Lobos de Washington. A sequel, to cover the current years, is to be entitled Los Bozos de Washington.

• Vincenta N'Dongo

Let's finish up, shall we, with two Virginia Madsen movies. She's accidentally topless in one sweet scene from Class and then she's in the shower with some long forgotten walking attitude of an actor in Creator. The latter movie, with Peter O'Toole, is the biggest waste of talent until Wild, Wild West hit the scene.

• Virginia Madsen in "Class"
• Madsen in "Creator" (1, 2)