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Where
would Skine— er, Cinemax be without direct-to-video trash
like this? Oh, it's trash all right. Slick, glossy trash...
An "erotic thriller" formula pic, strictly by the numbers and
tailor made for late night cable TV. It's also a drool-inducing
showcase for the tenderlicious bod of hot young starlet Jaime
Pressly (Ringmaster, Joe
Dirt). And what, we ask, is at all wrong with that?
Pressly stars as Violet, the sister of Drew Barrymore's
home-wrecking character from the first Poison Ivy film. (This
is # 3, by the way... not that you should give a flip.) In a
flashback sequence that opens the movie, Violet and Ivy are
8 year olds living in the wealthy Greer household; their mother
Catherine is the live-in maid. Seems mom has been carrying on
with Ivan Greer (Brit ex-rocker Michael Des Barres), a workaholic
banker, for some time. (Mrs. Greer is a frigid ice queen.) Greer
comes home early from work and catches Catherine banging the
hunky young pool cleaner and is pissed — he doesn't like the
women he's screwing around with behind his wife's back to screw
around on him. Mrs. Greer happens to walk in during the
ensuing argument and learns all. Busted, Catherine is immediately
sacked and forced to leave the house with her kids. This saddens
the Greers' young daughter, Joy, who was best friends with Violet.
Flash forward 11 years. Violet, now a sexy blonde bombshell,
shows up on the Greers' doorstep out of the blue. Straight off
the bus from Arizona, she's come to L.A. looking for work, with
an eye to attending community college. (Or so she claims.) Ostensibly
just dropping by to see her childhood friend Joy, Violet manages
to weasel her way into the Greer home; Joy (Megan Edwards) asks
her dad to let Violet stay with them as a houseguest until she
can get on her own two feet. Mrs. Greer isn't around to object.
The Greers are either long divorced or Ivan was widowed some
years before — the movie isn't quite clear on this point. To
please his daughter, Ivan agrees. Of course this is an appalling
mistake. Violet wastes no time turning the Greer household upside
down. Contrary to her claim of working the night shift as a
waitress at Denny's, in reality she's a high-priced dominatrix
with a list of well-off clients. A wicked, manipulative bitch,
she conspires to turn Joy's upper class friends against her,
seduce her Yale-bound fiancé Michael (Greg Vaughn), and bed
daddy Ivan as well, all in very short order. Only the crusty
"Mrs. B" (Susan Tyrrell), the Greers' housekeeper, suspects
that Violet isn't merely an innocent young woman who needs a
helping hand. But even she doesn't realize just how far Violet
is willing to go to fulfill her schemes…
So why does she
do it? For most of the film Violet's just a malevolent little
trickster who seems content to sabotage the lives of people
more privileged than she is, using her street smarts and luscious
body to get her way. But in the film's final act she's revealed
as a stone-cold psycho capable of murder. (Gotta have that "thriller"
element to go with the "erotic".) In fact, the whole thing gets
pretty silly at this point — all of Violet's clever deviousness
seems to instantly desert her as she makes one boneheaded mistake
after another, finally clueing the über-dense Joy that her friend
isn't such a pal after all. The ending, which leaves but one
character left alive, is patently ridiculous. So the story is
bad, the acting is bad… So what? There's only one reason why
this film exists. With her gloriously beautiful body and wicked,
Traci Lords-like pout, Jaime Pressly is simply gorgeous to behold.
As stupid as the majority of the plot is, we could readily believe
that Michael and Ivan's spines would turn to jelly whenever
her character put the moves on them. Our reaction on glimpsing
the naked Pressly was pretty much the same as theirs: slack-jawed
and goggle-eyed. Pop star Prince was prescient indeed when he
wrote that song lyric back in the '80s: Girl, you've got
an ass like I've never seen!
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