Trying to gauge which movies will rise from the ashes to unexpectedly gain a new lease of life on streaming is about as close to impossible as a task can be, but if we take a quick glance at recent developments – coupled with the shocking surge of 1974 Italian drama Appassionata – then we can infer without a shadow of a doubt that sex will always sell to subscribers of any platform.
In the space of less than a week, Netflix’s steamy series Sex/Life returned with a bang to become one of the platform’s biggest hits, while Lifetime’s The Client List also put in a strong showing, no doubt due to its salacious inspirations. Genuine softcore pornography has even managed to make a splash, so we shouldn’t really be all that surprised that director Gianluigi Calderone’s descent into borderline exploitative territory has become the latest titillating tale to seize attention.
Per FlixPatrol, Appassionata has shed its inhibitions to wind up as one of the most-watched films on ad-supported platform Freevee, although those heading in for the sole purpose of simply seeing some skin may left more than a touch disconcerted by what they end up getting instead, even if there is plenty of flesh on display.
The story finds two teenage schoolgirls caught in a bizarre and ultimately unsettling quadrangle, with one aiming to seduce the father of the other, all while the middle-aged patriarch debates whether or not to institutionalize his mentally ill wife, without even mentioning the skin-crawling Oedipal fascination his own daughter holds. 1970s European cinema was a strange place to undersell it dramatically, but who knew streaming crowds were such connoisseurs of the niche movement?