When I saw that this movie existed, starring Shannon Tweed, Julie Strain, Wings Hauser, and Marc Singer, and directed by Jim Wynorski, I knew I had to make it happen, and luckily I found it on The Internet Archive, so here we are making it happen. What I didn't expect was to have an historical moment on the DTVC in the form of our first ever back door 50 Club entry! Who'd'a thunk?
Victim of Desire has Marc Singer as an SEC investigator looking into businessman Leland Duvall's (Wings) finances after $70 million goes missing. Duvall's also on the hook after a judgement is rendered against him when his defective electric blanket kills over 100 people. When Leland's car ends up at the bottom of a ravine, Singer suspects foul play, so he teams up with an LAPD detective (Johnathan "Johnny" Roastbeef from Goodfellas) to look into what happened, and Duvall's widow (Tweed) seems like as good a place to start as any--and with an erotic thriller like this, you know what we mean by that! As Singer gets in deeper, he gets in deeper with Tweed (insert rim shot) but this leads to all kinds of issues with his investigation, and now Mr. Roastbeef is thinking Singer may be in on it too. It's up to Singer to solve this thing and clear his name, but is he going to be a victim of desire?
This isn't any kind of classic or must watch, but it's exactly what you're looking for when you fire up a 90s Erotic Thriller--well almost, there isn't as much nudity, this is less on the softcore porn side and more on the thriller side, which works well enough for me, but I can see how that may not work for others. In that sense though the title has a secondary purpose, because if you were a kid in the 90s and saw this on the video store shelf or listed in your TV Guide (who is listed as one of the critic reviews by the way--though they don't review it, just summarize it) and thought "ooh, how much will I get to see Shannon Tweed and Julie Strain naked?" and you end up disappointed, you in fact were a victim of desire. For me, it's the names, the Wynorski direction, and the 90s nostalgia. You get things like Peter Spellos as a coroner eating ribs while he goes over the details of Duvall's death to Johnny Roastbeef, Wings Hauser yelling at Jay Henry Richardson, or Julie Strain giving Shannon Tweed a tension-filled massage when we know Strain is up to something. It's a shame this is only available on the Internet Archive, someone's gotta get a version on Tubi!
Let's get to that back door 50 Club entry. I want to say it was The Sweeper episode of the pod (episode 165 in the archives) where guest Chris "The Brain" Kacvinsky from Bulletproof Action and I were talking about Spiro Razatos, and he mentioned another stunt coordinator for PM, Cole S. McKay. I hadn't heard of him before, despite reviewing a ton of movies on his IMDb bio--and to be fair, I'd only heard of Razatos when Gary Daniels mentioned him in an interview, so other than Art Camacho I was really bad on crediting stunt work overall. So now McKay was on my radar, but in a recent conversation with Jon Cross from The After Movie Diner--and the upcoming PM Entertainment Podcast!--McKay came up, and I realized he probably needed to be tagged. And he was, to the tune of 55 movies! This one we're doing now is 56, which puts him ahead of Art Camacho for third-most all time. Obviously he's a definite Hall of Fame induction this fall, but now I also need to update my 50 Club imaging and the 40 and 50 Club lists--also I discovered that I'd missed a PM tag for one of their movies, so they're at 47 films now. This is not his 50 Club post, we'll do a real official entry in near future, plus this fall he'll be inducted into the Hall of Fame, but for now we'll leave at here's to you Mr. McKay, you're one of the greatest.
This is the second of two originally-produced films starring both Shannon Tweed and Julie Strain, the other being Rowdy Girls, which we've reviewed. (There's also Bimbo Movie Bash which has archive footage of Young Blood, Fresh Meat starring Strain and Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death starring Tweed, but they weren't acting together in that.) It's a shame they didn't do more together, because they have a great antagonistic chemistry. Forget Joan Collins and Linda Evans, this was the Dynasty pairing I wanted to see! And I get why some people seeing this would've been disappointed by the lack of nudity from both actors, but for me the novelty of this being one of only two films they did together makes it a special entry, and one we're lucky to have. For numbers, Strain is now at 10 films, which puts her second all-time among women on the site, after Rothrock's 43, and Tweed's at 9, which puts her tied with Dona Speir for third all-time among women. Since we've pretty much exhausted Speir's DTVC oeuvre, expect Strain and Tweed to keep moving past her, but with Rothrock's lead and the fact that she's been pumping out a lot more stuff lately, they'll probably be competing for second, which I think is all right.
We last saw Wings Hauser about two years ago when we reviewed Original Gangsters, so it's good to get him back on the site. Two years is too long when you consider how much great stuff he still has out there to review, so I need to focus on getting to it, especially some of the great 90s stuff he did that we haven't covered yet. Part of it is availability, but between YouTube, free streamers like Tubi and Plex, and the Internet Archive, more of it is coming to the surface, so I don't have an excuse. And even though this role doesn't have a lot of screentime, the performance he gives us is plenty robust enough to get the job done. It just adds to the overall fun nature of a movie like this to have Wings yelling at people or looking up from his computer with his mouth agape in that way only Wings can do. He's at 23 movies now, and I don't know if we can get him to the 30 Club this year, but maybe by sometime next year. We'll put it on the map to get it done, because he should be there.
Finally, I mentioned above that Peter Spellos has a small part as the rib-eating coroner. He unfortunately left us in November of 2023, but when it came to movies like these, specially ones directed by Fred Olen Ray or Jim Wynorski, he could pop in on these small roles and really deliver something that added more flavor--kind of like the sauce he was dipping his ribs into in this film. My first time ever podcasting was on Drunk on VHS when host Moe Porn had me and Jon Cross on to discuss Hard to Die, and while they both knew who Spellos was, I didn't, so I joked that I thought his last name was pronounced "SPAY-yos," like it was Spanish, which led to a series of jokes and tangents from us after that. Later Jon became friends with Spellos, and I remember him as a guest on Jon's Crosstalk podcast, where not only was he gracious and a lot of fun to listen to, but he also had some great insight on acting. He, like so many other actors at that time, knew what was expected from them in roles like the rib-eating coroner, and as a true professional, he delivered, and in so doing gave the films he was a part of that much more to make them fun for us in the audience. Here's to you Mr. Spellos, you were truly one of the greats, and you will be missed.
And with that, let's wrap this up. I watched this on the Internet Archive, and you can tell by the screens that it wasn't the best quality, but it got me to the church on time. I don't even know if a VHS exists, but hopefully someday soon it'll be more available. Maybe it's not a classic, but it's worth checking out.
For more info: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0118079
And if you haven't yet, check out my newest book, Nadia and Aidan, at Amazon in paperback or Kindle!
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