Wicked Deeds is much like Carnal Wishes (2015) in that it takes a familiar film noir and/or noirish elements and adds explicit sex. However, unlike Carnal Wishes, it screws up in my opinion. Also, I doubt that my review of Wicked Deeds will end up being a part of a political scandal like it was when Ted Cruz pulled that attack ad of his. She didn’t even have a sex scene in the movie, but only made a cameo appearance at the end of the film. That didn’t stop the law firm Rick Santorum once worked for from paying a visit to my review.
I’m not really surprised that somebody at K&L Gates looked at my review. What I am surprised at is that I didn’t do any hacking to get that image. I was looking at our site’s stat section when I saw a weird URL so I clicked on it. What should have just been an internal network message from some sort of edge router to the person coming to my review from a computer at the firm was actually at a publicly accessible URL. I’ve seen this one other time on another one of my late night cable reviews. I don’t know why ScanSafe thought this was a good idea.
I also don’t know why the filmmakers of Wicked Deeds thought it was a good idea to take an otherwise decent porno noir and extend the sex scenes so long that any pacing is broken. At least they were kind enough to give me a title card that I didn’t have to black box in any way.
The movie begins like slasher movies do. Except instead of someone getting killed, two people have sex. The two people are a married couple. She is named Kira (Anna Morna). Luckily, we are getting An Erotic Tale of Ms. Dracula (2014) Anna Morna rather than Lolita from Interstellar Space (2014) Anna Morna. The husband is Roy (Chad White). He too was in both An Erotic Tale of Ms. Dracula and Lolita from Interstellar Space. You may remember him as playing Van Helsing. I will give the sex scenes in this movie one thing. They tend to be more intimate and erotic, then the usual stuff you see. That’s why I don’t mind this opening sex scene so much, but them reusing the length of this scene for all of them, becomes a problem. This sex scene should have been the longest to establish intimacy between the married couple, while the later sex scenes should have gotten shorter and shorter to go along with the building of suspense in the film.
Something else to mention here is that this is another one of these that was shot by Lex Lynne Smith. So, no matter what, it is well shot for these movies. Usually that’s something you say almost as an insult to a film, but after seeing some of these shot on video sex late night cable movies like Monster of the Nudist Colony (2013), I mean it genuinely.
After they are finished, we get a scene almost like the one from Carnal Wishes. At the end of the married couple’s sex scene he just got up and left for a late night meeting. Here, we find out that he is going out of town to do some survey work. She kind of wants to come along, but he tells her that they both know she doesn’t like the jungle heat. She brings up that the hotel probably has a nice spa so that he has an excuse to bring up that he finally heard back from the handyman who is going to fix their spa. It’s not only part of the setup for the film, but also an obvious reference to the stereotype that all porn begins with a woman inviting over a pizza deliveryman for sex. She also mentions that she would feel more comfortable if she had a gun in the house also as a setup for something later in the film. He says absolutely not, and that having guns in the house means it’s just an accident waiting to happen. Funny how some these porno films seem to have more progressive politics than a lot of mainstream cinema.
Anyways, you can see that there is a gun in the house. It’s in his night table, but even having watched the whole film, I still don’t know if it was a gun he or she was keeping in secret. She wakes up to find that not only has her husband left a rose on his pillow for her, but the handyman named Derrick (Ryan McLane) has arrived. You may remember Ryan McLane as the toughest scientist to convert in Vixens from Venus (2016).
She goes back inside the house and receives a mysterious phone call asking her who the killer was in the first Friday the 13th movie. That, or something about telling her that her husband needs to stay out of Mexico. She tries to get in touch with him, but no such luck. She calls her sister-in-law Rose (Chanel Preston). She comes over to try and calm her down. I don’t know where you might know Chanel Preston from, but she did play Marilyn Chambers in Night at the Erotic Museum (2015). That reminds me that I will have to get around to reviewing Behind the Green Door (1972). Not because it was a landmark film of the genre, but because an early childhood friend of mine was the daughter of parents who managed the Mitchell brother’s empire. Neither of us was told by our parents till we were older.
Kira goes to take a shower or something and comes back to find this.
It’s another joke about the whole pizza deliveryman cliche. This is also where the film starts to get strange because Kira talks with her sister shortly afterwards and she denies it ever happened. At this point, Kira just chalks it up to her sister being embarrassed to have hooked up with a handyman she has never met before. But the weirdness doesn’t stop here. It only grows. I think it’s safe to say that the film is going for the Gaslight (1944) type thing here. It’s not really a spoiler because I am going to explain the whole thing anyways.
After talking with her sister, Kira lies down and appears to go to sleep. Then we are treated to a sex scene between her and the handyman. Interestingly, she wakes up suddenly from it in her bed rather than on the couch where she was lying down before the scene started or at the pool where the scene occurred. It goes without saying that she still can’t reach her husband.
Sis continues to try and calm her down, which is precisely why she invites her friend Tracy over so that actress Silvia Saige can get her fifth acting credit on IMDb. Once again, it’s a sex scene that goes on way too long. It’s there because it’s another thing that Kira needs to witness to further push her into a perceived insanity when everyone acts like it didn’t happen.
Even the pictures/video she takes with her not-iPhone will end up magically disappearing later on. After that scene finally ends, we get a reappearance of Mister New Jersey Show Me State from Scared Topless (2015). That being Billy Chappell making an appearance as another handyman there to fix the spa. He even has a text that he claims was sent by Kira to him.
Kira finds that the pictures are missing and everyone denies anything she has seen. She goes up to bed, which apparently means the couch where her husband appears out of nowhere.
The scene of course goes on too long again. The next morning she finds the rose on his pillow, but when she gets Roy on the phone he says he’s still in Mexico. Kira’s sister is very concerned and brings in a doctor played by Robert Baldwin.
It’s not likely, but you may have seen Baldwin in something like the Fred Olen Ray film Illicit Dreams 2 (1998). As you can see, he is very concerned for Kira. Again, she goes to sleep and again, she is visited for another sexual encounter. This time it’s the original handyman.
This is when things really start to spin out of control. I say that because even my iPad decided this scene needed a Dutch tilt.
Kira confronts the handyman about taking advantage of her while she was drugged by the doctor. She cuts him with a knife and he flees. She then tells her sister that she thinks she might have been raped. Then the handyman comes downstairs and doesn’t remember any of it. In fact, he’s not even cut.
Kira kicks both her sister and the handyman out of the house, but finds blood on the floor. She comes into her living room to head upstairs and sees the other handyman with Tracy.
This is a perfect example of why this film ultimately doesn’t work. This should immediately lead to her going upstairs to discover this.
This scene should also be followed immediately by her passing out and falling down the stairs, which then leads us to our dramatic reveal and ending. But in both cases, they lead to long sex scenes. It completely ruins the suspenseful atmosphere that should be present in this part of the film. It leads me to believe that on the one hand they wanted to do this Gaslight style story, but on the other hand they were obligated to have a certain number of sex scenes that were required to be of a certain length. It’s like watching an action movie where foot or car chases go on so long that you are no longer caught up in the moment. Too bad cause I like the ending.
It turns out that the husband and the sister-in-law arranged this whole thing to drive Kira crazy. The doctor even performed ECT on her. The idea was that the only way Roy could get around the prenup that Kira’s brother had him sign was to get her committed.
But what about that gun from earlier?
Cut to black, and we hear gunshots.
If they had just trimmed down the sex scenes so that they moved from long and intimate to short almost glimpses as her mind spiraled more out of control, then this could have been one of the best of these I’ve seen so far. Sadly, it doesn’t do that. It’s one of these films that I call a missed opportunity.
