Wild Side

and

Donald Cammell's Wild Side

1995

Johnny's comments:

I've talked about Wild Side before but I had never capped it until now. Wild Side was released in 1995 straight-to-video and mostly went unwatched. This paragraph from IMDB sums up what went wrong better than I can:

After the movie's release, the director Donald Cammell committed suicide, possibly caused by what happened with the movie. Strangely though there was an effort to get Cammell's cut of the movie released and in 1999 the movie was edited to notes made by Cammell and was given a video/DVD release in 2000 with some love but not much more than it got from its initial release.

My memories of learning of the movie was that Picture magazine (the Australian softcore mag) had a spread featuring the nude scenes from the movie, possibly years after it's release, once Anne Heche became more famous. So I decided to take a look at the movie and remember liking it as a good little B-grade thriller with a crazy, baffling plot and a great over-the-top performance from Christopher Walken, but also a fairly decent lead performance from Heche, just before she broke out. I also watched the director's cut but I don't remember it having that much of an impact on me.

Rewatching the two different cuts of the movie reveals that the main difference between the two is that the director's cut lingers on scenes for what seems like forever, has a more relaxed mood where the plot isn't really the focus and ends in a fairly ambiguous way. It is also 20 minutes longer and feels every bit of it. The original cut is more of a straightforward thriller with an unambiguous ending also longer sex scenes, particularly the Heche/Chen lesbian scene which makes sense as the distributors are trying to sell a sexy thriller. It's also clear that the relationship between Walken's and Chen's character is based on the writer/director team's own relationship. I like both versions although I don't really have a favourite cut, as both work in their own way.

I had been waiting for a HD release of the movie before capping it but it looks very like that's not happening any time soon (cue it becoming available before the end of the year just to piss me off). As I said above, all of the sex scenes have different edits and there is more nudity in the original cut. The collages are made from the original cut, as being in fullscreen, it had more to work with.

Anne Heche and Joan Chen film clips from Wild Side

Anne Heche and Joan Chen film clips from Donald Cammell's Wild Side

Chen

Heche