Not to make broad assumptions on a perennially-popular genre, but the vast majority of mainstream erotic thrillers don’t tend to rope in a talented cast of esteemed thespians or fare particularly well with critics, which makes Wild Things an outlier in more ways than one.
Not only does it hold a remarkably solid (at least by the standards of the competition) 64 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, it even made the bold attempt of trying to tell a multi-layered and complex narrative in amongst the rampant titillation and showing of skin.
Denise Richards’ thoroughly unconvincing high school-aged student falsely accuses her guidance counselor of sexual assault after he rejects her amorous advances, leading to his arrest following a highly-publicized scandal. A suitably sleazy lawyer gets dragged into the mix to try and exonerate the innocent party, but not before Neve Campbell enters the fray as a secondary victim playing a very similar game.
Matt Dillon, Kevin Bacon, and Robert Wagner are just three of the heavyweight talents joining the aforementioned femme fatales, with Wild Things being the subject of hand-to-heard literary and thematic analysis for its updated reflections on ancient mythology, which is definitely something you can’t say about the majority of sizzling and steamy genre films.
Of course, you’d wager that FlixPatrol naming it as one of the most-watched features on the Rakuten rankings was driven by reasons other than its nuanced reinvention of Greek tragedies based on how often cinematic eroticism takes its place on the on-demand charts, but if certainly can’t be completely ruled out. The less said about sequels Wild Things 2, Diamonds in the Rough, and Foursome the better, though, because they were trashy in all the wrong ways.