The Animal in Me (1985)

While writing up the review for Kirdy Stevens's Taboo IV, I learned that the majority of the films he made were written and produced by his wife, Helen Terrie, so it was no surprise when I saw, during the opening credits, that The Animal in Me was written and produced by her, too. It turns out Taboo IV and The Animal in Me were released in the same year, although in terms of quality, they're worlds apart. Maybe the Taboo series had more clout, because Stevens got to shoot that one on film and was stuck with video for Animal. The former had a much more substantial cast (Karen Summer was in both, for what that's worth).



The Animal in Me stars Colleen Brennan as Maggie, a divorced romance novelist who has soured on the idea of romance, if she ever believed in it in the first place. Her daughter, Pepper (Summer), on the other hand, is still infatuated by the idea of infatuation. She's fully smitten with a new doctor at the hospital she works at - she's a nurse - Dr. Morgan (Jerry Butler).



Pepper has a rough go of it romantically. She has to contend with the unwelcome advances of her mother's boyfriend, Travis (played convincingly skeevily by Craig Roberts), then she's set up with Warren (Peter North), her friend Stacy's (Gina Valentino) boyfriend Bobby's (Tom Byron) visiting buddy, who doesn't bother to engage with her while the foursome are out in the park or hanging by a pool. When Pepper calls a cab to go home from Stacy's rather than get into Bobby's proposed "swingin' and swappin'" Warren complains that it looks like he struck out. A real "F" for effort, bud.



When she finally gets a chance to date Dr. Morgan, after creepily peeping on the young couple Maggie seduces him, ostensibly to prove to Maggie that knights in shining armor don't exist.



Ultimately, the nail in the coffin of Pepper's belief in romance isn't finding out that Dr. Morgan got it on with her mother, but when Travis - initially tender and caring when Pepper discovers her mother's and Dr. Morgan's dirty deed - wears her down and has sex with her.



The only thing that prevents it from being sexual assault is that she does technically consent: after repeated tearful "No"s, she finally says, "Okay, Travis. Give it to me, dammit, give it to me."

Hot Pursuit (1983)

I'm almost certain during one of the dozen or so times Kenan Thompson impersonated Charles Barkley on SNL, he said that Michael Jordan recruited him to the 1992 Dream Team by saying he could take a vacation to Barcelona, drink, gamble, and beat Angola by seventy points. Or something to that effect, anyway.

I get the sense Annette Haven got a similar pitch to star in Hot Pursuit, the difference being the vacation was to Amsterdam and she had to shoot a couple of sex scenes instead of play basketball.

Little Miss Shirley (Haven) is a famous children's entertainer whose career and fame is threatened by the existence of a porno film she shot when she was young and trying to break into show business. She hires a private investigator (Abel Caine) to track down the tape for her.

He starts by going to see the photography studio where the film was shot, interrupting what looks like it could have been a European shampoo ad, but turns into a sapphic sex scene.



The photographer tells him he did shoot the film but doesn't have it because he heard the actress may have been underage so he stashed it in a mattress at the hotel he was staying in at the time.



The PI makes his way to the brothel to check all the mattresses only to be thwarted by the brothel's bouncer. He gains entry multiple times using various ruses (as a window washer, with an inebriated city health inspector, and finally in black face - yeesh), each time getting to check one mattress before getting tossed again. Each of the times he gets in includes a sex scene.

The first (as the window washer) finds him in the room of an experienced sexual adventurer who's being fellated in a hot tub. He's beckoned to join by the fellater and receives the same treatment (according to IAFD, Caine used body doubles for all hardcore scenes) culminating in an underwater pop shot. It's something you don't see very often, but for anyone that's dealt with ejaculate and water, it's hard to separate the visual spectacle from the unpleasant texture....

When he's posing as a health inspector, he comes across a BDSM scene involving two dominant women and man wearing the top half of a suit of armor and Donald Duck-ing (or Winnie the Pooh-ing; take your pick).