Absurd and pretentious, this scabrous adult drama about Beverly Hills thrill-seekers concerns an out-of-work actor so desperate for employment, he'll serve as a boy toy for a self-tormenting socialite and her voyeuristic husband. The result is about as salacious as a Marquis de Sade
boutique on Rodeo Drive.
Famous for a dental commercial in which he lets out a memorable yelp, actor James (Judd Nelson) follows wealthy Lauren (Joanna Pacula) around at a party as if he's never seen a woman before. Then the sex games begin: petulant, panting Lauren turns out to be one hard tease to please. And she's
nothing when compared with her depraved arms-dealer hubby Richard (Patrick Bachau), who guns down a man in front of Lauren and her guest. As it turns out, the shooting was faked in the name of good, clean erotic fun. The jaded Richard hints that he'll pay the unemployed actor to have sex with
Lauren while he watches, but unbeknownst to James and Lauren, the morally jaundiced Richard has even more advanced decadence available on his video screens: he drugs unwary strangers and videotapes their death throes while they're buried alive somewhere on his property.
After Richard shoots blanks at him and Lauren declares him a dud, James flees. But he's so smitten with Lauren that he returns for more. At a chic night spot, they pick up Mimi (Rebecca Arthur) and Bob (Willy Garson) and wager on who can get their conquest to bed faster. Not to be outdone,
Richard invites a hitchhiker, Hal (John Pyper Ferguson), back to the house and kills him. James and Lauren plan to run away together, but Richard catches James and chloroforms him. When Lauren returns from the rendezvous James was unable to keep, Richard regales her with his sick videos, then
straps explosives to her. James escapes the coffin in which Richard has imprisoned him, overpowers Richard and ties him up with his own home made bomb. James gives Lauren the pleasure of pressing the explosion-button on her mate.
Recommended for Judd Nelson completists and connoisseurs of arcane trash, EVERY BREATH forces its audience to watch a lot of extraneous material as this flaccid erotica sputters to its morbid conclusion. It's what Roman Polanski's CUL-DE-SAC might have been, if it had been directed by Richard
Benjamin and featured elements stolen from THE VANISHING and SPEED. EVERY BREATH is irksome rather than frightening, its idea of naughtiness more ludicrous than titillating. Pacula and Bachau merely thicken their accents to intimate imported European perversity and, if the pampered
sensation-seekers in EVERY BREATH think that Nelson is a stud-muffin, then they're more to be pitied than feared. (Graphic violence, extreme profanity, extensive nudity, sexual situations.) leave a comment
