Timothée Chalamet crying in front of a crackling fireplace at the end of Call Me By Your Name. The Avengers finally getting their much-deserved shawarma. Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig and the entire cast of White Noise dancing to LCD Soundsystem inside an alarmingly overlit supermarket. Great end-credits scenes come and go. But the one that’s never gotten the proper credit it deserves belongs to director John McNaughton's delicious 1998 sleaze-fest, Wild Things, which turns 25 this week.
Riding in on the rear end of the '80s and '90s boom of erotic thrillers (films that ranged from your high-class Fatal Attractions to your Skinemax specials starring Shannon Tweed), perhaps it’s Neve Campbell’s presence that’s always made Wild Things feel like the sexy twin to Wes Craven’s Scream. Both films took a subgenre in its last gasps and injected it with a winky post-modern irreverence, dialing the expectations up to hitherto gargantuan proportions and engorging it full of life in the process. The film was a big hit (especially on home video — believe me, I worked in a video store at the time), while also being a fresh introduction to the genre it was both sending up and beating at its own game for an entire generation.
What's Wild Things about?
Wild Things stars an especially sweaty Matt Dillon as Sam Lombardo, a high school counselor and sail instructor in the affluent Miami suburbs, where he spends his days (and nights) counseling his students in all the wrong ways. Two young ladies, in particular, take to his lessons: rich bitch Kelly Van Ryan (Denise Richards) and the Doc-Marten aficionado Suzie Toller (Campbell), a grungester from the wrong side of the swamp.
In theory, these two teenagers should have nothing in common. But in practice they forgo their economical dissimilarities when the champagne starts pouring over their exuberantly bared bosoms. (It’s a movie that revels in all the trash excess it can, and that’s why we love it.) Rounding out our foursome (always that one degree away) is Kevin Bacon, playing Detective Ray Duquette, who gets dragged dick-first into everybody’s money-grubbing machinations.
See, everybody’s got a plot. Or two. Or 22. Kelly’s got a great big trust fund she can’t get her hands on since her mother (the spectacular Theresa Russell, dolloping her specific brand of Ken Russell–flavored camp across the proceedings) won’t allow it. But Kelly, a la Veruca Salt, wants it now; she wants it right now! And she’s bringing all the boys and the girls and the alligators to her yard to get it. Unfortunately she trusts in the wrong gators, and the hot sexy bodies begin piling right up.
Why Wild Things is a great guilty pleasure watch:
A swarthy mirage of southern Florida seediness and greediness, Wild Things could have been a very different film in less capable hands. Just watch any of its straight-to-video sequels and you’ll see proof of that. But McNaughton, who stormed onto the scene in 1986 with the unforgettable horror flick Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, knows how to rig sex and violence to maximum effect. Obviously, the effect he’s going for in Wild Things is a far less soul-shattering one than what he went for in Henry! But while it’s played for mainstream pop appeal in the latter, both films truly, deeply despair in the face of humanity. Miami, like Henry’s squalid Chicago, is filled with monsters. They just wear brighter outfits as they’re ripping each other’s teeth out.
By the film’s end, a full 30 twists later, it’s Neve Campbell’s Suzie, suddenly resembling a summering Peter Pan in a bleach-blonde pixie-cut, who’s the last person standing. She sails off toward the bright blue horizon, Matt Dillon’s poisoned body floating in her wake and Kelly’s millions about to fill up her Swiss bank account. And the words THE END emblazon the screen. So we giggle in our empty popcorn tubs at the brazen beach-noir spectacle we’ve just witnessed, and prepare our baggage for an exit.
The Wild Things end-credits scene demands your attention.
But wait! Don’t you go anywhere, because McNaughton & Co aren’t done working us over — not by a long-shot. Wild Things is too much damn movie to stay contained within the typical borders of such things. And so a split-second later, there’s Matt Dillon suddenly sitting at a bar, no longer dead. And there’s Denise Richards now sauntering in — what the? We’ve just seen these people bite the bullet (some of them literally) — are these even more twists? Can our brains handle it?
Turns out, it’s something far smarter than that. Rewinding us backward Memento-style through its byzantine plot to showcase scenes we didn’t get to see earlier, as the credits roll, we watch all of the elaborate double and triple-crosses snap into place. Wild Things is less a Whodunit than it is an Everybodydunit: There’s not an innocent soul among its sour bunch. And in seven short bursts of scenes interspersed between the actors’ names, we get a look at the missing puzzle pieces that showcase just how sordid these characters really were the whole time.
If you thought Wild Things’ winking debauchery of sex and drugs and violence was something before that THE END popped up, oh just you wait. McNaughton’s still got cocaine and dildos and gay pick-ups and gun blasts straight to the powder blue brassieres up his sleeve. We’ve got Matt Dillon and Denise Richards going at it doggy-style a split-second before we see pliers pulling out Neve Campbell’s front tooth. Every sordid interaction that the movie pretended it was too good to show us before? Now they're all splayed across the screen in great big capital letters, and here, just when you thought you were out.
Well, that’s just the Wild Things way. While it might have been fun to watch the cast dance to “Kokomo” as those credits rolled the way of so many films before and since, McNaughton chose this ingenious route instead, and thank goodness. Teasing our brains and our lower organs with a car-crash pile-up of new information and sexual positions, it’s giddiness-inducing, and perfectly in line with the goofy, maladjusted good-time on tap. Those end credits sum up the entire succulent Wild Things experience: too much, too rich, and too spicy hot to handle. Cajun-seasoned sublime!
How to watch: Wild Things is streaming on Showtime(opens in a new tab).
