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).
There's no indication how he got in the final time: he's not in a disguise and the scene starts with him in a room starting a search when he's startled by a prostitute who's a dead-ringer for Shirley (because she's also played by Annette Haven). Based on his confusion, it's clear he thinks it is Shirley - and initially I assumed so, too - but when she started talking her voice had been over-dubbed by another actress. Apparently she was supposed to be a different woman. Bizarre.
First, she tells him she's going to show him the Kama Sutra from "end to beginning" - leading to a montage of simulated sex in various positions - then, when he tells her what he's looking for, she tells him that before it was a brothel, the business was a hotel and after a renovation, many mattresses were stored in the basement. A customer, who happened to be a music producer, suggested they donate the unneeded mattresses to a music studio for soundproofing. Sure.
So, off they go to find the studio, which is in a bunker, seemingly in the middle of nowhere.
They walk in on a rock band full of toughs called Catfish Nico and His Flying Lizards rehearsing.
When the interruption is about to lead to the PI getting his ass kicked, not-Shirely has a stroke of genius and says they're from a recording company and if CNHFL wants to prove they're worthy of being signed, they should "play for [her their] best-rehearsed number." They start to, but that leads to her seducing them using a pair of heavily-modified Guess jeans.
Ultimately, the PI is given the time he needs to find the film.
He and not-Shirley screen it for Shirley to prove it's what it's supposed to be. In what's almost a great twist, as the film plays out, all of the camera angles obscure Shirley's face, pointed out by not-Shirley, to the chagrin of the detective who laments all of his trials and tribulations tracking down the film. But then, the bit is reversed because at the very end of the film, during the actor's pop shot, you fully see Shirley's face, so it would have been a career-killer after all.
The final scene is Shirley performing her new hit song about her teddy bear as the crowd goes wild. Fame saved!
It was coincidental seeing this one so near to Expose Me, Lovely because in that entry, I mentioned that there was a path for it to lean into parody. While Hot Pursuit doesn't go full The Naked Gun, there are certainly some elements. Early on, there was a pretty good camera gag that made it seemed like the detective was getting into a fancy car, only to end up in this absurd little yellow thing:
The peak of the goofiness was a scene between the brothel manager and staff:
Let's find out why Robert Rimmer deemed this one a "Collector's Choice":
Annette Haven has the only familiar face (and body) in this one, which was shot in Amsterdam...and has a total European sophistication.... What...keeps you watching is Annette, who is a great actress, and the intricate story...."
Annette Haven is great, and the film certainly has it's moments, but like a lot of movies I watch for this blog, it's a few small things away from being truly great. Recency bias aside, Expose Me, Lovely is a great comparison, so I'm going to rate Hot Pursuit a CC50 as well.
RANDOM THOUGHTS
° Apparently, "Leeuw" is Dutch for "lion" and De Leeuw or DeLeeuw is a common(ish) Dutch surname, which is news to me, because when I saw Kees DeLeeuw in the credits, I wondered if it was a nod to Lisa De Leeuw.
° The blackface scene would have been bad enough given modern sensibilities (I still can't believe that Soul Man was released in 1986), but considering the Dutch slave trade history, it's mind-bogglingly tone deaf.
° I can't figure out if the interior brothel scenes were actually shot at the real Yab Yum, but it was a real - and famous - brothel.
° At the film's narrative midpoint, when Shirley felt fully out of control, there was a music video interlude where she seemed to imply that if her career was going to be destroyed, she'd just lean into being a rebel:
As noted in the credits, Annette Haven did all the singing, so good for her, I guess.
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