Claudia (Jacqueline Bisset) is a wired jet-set businesswoman who hires tyro lawyer Emily (Carre Otis) to help her close a deal. Prim Emily, a Midwest farm girl still wet under the collar – but highly attractive – is dazed to find herself on a plane to Rio. There she meets Claudia’s old flame Wheeler (Mickey Rourke), a self-made millionaire with perverse sexual tastes.
Hypnotizing Emily with his original personality (?), he forces her to forget her good-girl upbringing and do liberating things. What doesn’t work is the hold Rourke is supposed to have over Otis. Looking pudgy and puffy-faced, with a little gold earring, he is anything but an appetizing sex object.
As Emily, Otis really is hypnotically attractive, but she plays the still-waters-run-deep country beauty with expressionless immobility. Bisset, always a class act, here bubbles over with caricatured joie de vivre. As for eros, only when Emily breaks through Wheeler’s reserve/importence in the last sequence does pic deliver in a torrid, highly choreographed but equally explicit bedroom session between the two.
I don’t know how to start this review. I really don’t know how to start this review. Wild Orchid was that forgettable to me. It was so forgettable, that it ripped a hole in my mind causing a vortex to shut down my brain. In other words, I fell asleep. My god, this was boring.
A young lawyer, Emily Reed (Carre Otis), travels to an interview with an international law firm in New York City. She is young, beautiful and has the personality of cardboard. Carre Otis’ performance in this is so bad! She comes off as dull and uninterested with everything she interacts with. But, I am getting ahead of myself. The firm offers Reed a job in Rio de Janeiro.
She agrees to do so and meets with one of the firm’s top executives, Claudia Dennis (Jacqueline Bisset). Whilst Emily is in Rio de Janeiro, she experiences a sexual awakening, after witnessing two locals have animalistic sex. She then meets a multi-millionaire businessman, James Wheeler (Mickey Rourke). And they begin a series of erotic encounters.
Currently, Wild Orchid has garnered a 4.5 rating on IMDb, with a further 6% on Rotten Tomatoes. It was also nominated for two Razzie awards, one for Worst Actor (Rourke), and the other for Worst New Star (Otis). We are dealing with a movie that is utter tripe from beginning to end. But in all fairness, I don’t think it is 6% worthy of terribleness. I think Wild Orchid is more 25%. But that still is not much.
Wild Orchid has a story with barely any substance. It has been frequently summed up as the 50 Shades of Grey of the 1980’s. And you can tell that right from scene #1. This story is not interesting in the slightest. Although the setting is stylized to a ridiculous degree, with the softcore porn lighting and camerawork. The film is as stimulating as a paperclip.
So the premise is that a multi-millionaire businessman befriends a lawyer, and the lawyer is pulled under his gaze through the art of seduction until they both shag each other’s brains out like two horny canaries? Now where have I heard that one before? But also, there is nothing else of any interest. Yawn. It doesn’t hold your attention for very long with its bare bone narrative that it makes you fall asleep.
The film is very far-fetched. I do not believe that Otis is a lawyer. That’s what she says she is. But come on, to become a lawyer, you would not be in that job role at that age. She looks round about 20-ish. I can’t take that very seriously. It made me laugh, to say the least. With her frizzled hair, and glasses. It seems that they had taken the “nerdy girl becomes the beautiful girl” cliche. Only to ramp up the “sexuality” and “eroticism” by the end. It doesn’t help that she is absolutely dreadful throughout. There is no characteristics or quirks with her. She is simply a robot throughout Wild Orchid. As for Rourke, he plays a pimp. He oozes of slyness throughout, with him whispering every line of dialogue. But it ultimately does not pay off in the end, as both his and Otis’ chemistry is non-existent.
There is nothing really to recommend with this. It is a film that does not need to exist. It probably only exists because Rourke chose this script, and said “You know, my girlfriend would really like this role”. It was probably an excuse so that they could both release a theatrical sex tape. A borderline dull, and repetitive one. Next please.
Wild Orchid (1990)
Directed by: Zalman King
Starring: Mickey Rourke, Jacqueline Bisset, Carré Otis, Assumpta Serna, Bruce Greenwood, Oleg Vidov, Milton Gonçalves, Jens Peter, Bernardo Jablonski
Screenplay by: Patricia Louisiana Knopp, Zalman King
Production Design by: Carlos Conti
Cinematography by: Gale Tattersall
Film Editing by: Marc Grossman, Glenn Morgan
Costume Design by: Ileane Meltzer, Marlene Stewart
Set Decoration by: Leonardo Haertling
Art Direction by: Yeda Lewinsohn, Alexander A. Mayer
Music by: Simon Goldenberg, Geoff MacCormack
Distributed by: Entertainment Film Distributors
Release Date: April 27, 1990
Visits: 649
