The “sex-crazed” 1994 movie so bad Roger Ebert couldn’t believe his eyes: “I was stupefied”
Needless to say, the point of an erotic thriller is to steam up the screen and get audiences hot under the collar. When it works, it really works, but when it doesn’t work, you can end up with a movie so bad that Roger Ebert, the most noted critic of his era, couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing.
In his defence, he was far from alone. It might have been one of the most-rented videos of 1995, mostly because you’d suspect the people who didn’t pay to see it on the big screen had heard about its cavalcade of sex scenes and fancied hitting the pause button at the right moment, but it was shite.
A critical pariah, a box office bomb, a nine-time Razzie nominee, and a history-making one at that, since it set a benchmark that’s never been replicated by claiming the prestigious ‘Worst Picture’ prize without winning any other categories. In all honesty, it deserved more, and you have to ask yourself what on earth Bruce Willis was thinking when he agreed to star in 1994’s Color of Night.
Then again, the $15 million paycheque might answer that question, especially when he took a big pay cut to star in the same year’s Pulp Fiction, an even bigger pay cut to star alongside Paul Newman in Nobody’s Fool, and his fourth release of the annum was Rob Reiner’s North, which, ironically, Ebert fucking hated.
“Color of Night approaches badness from so many directions that one really must admire its imagination,” he wrote in a surprisingly high 1.5-star review. “Combining all the worst ingredients of an Agatha Christie whodunit and a sex-crazed slasher film, it ends in a frenzy of recycled thriller elements, with a chase scene, a showdown in an echoing warehouse, and not one but two cliches from Ebert’s Little Movie Glossary: The Talking Killer and the Climbing Villain.”
The story follows Willis’ psychologist, who’s also colour blind, upping sticks and moving to Los Angeles after one of his patients kills themselves in New York. However, things don’t go much better in his new home when he starts being stalked by a mysterious figure who clearly wants him dead, all while embarking on a shag-happy affair with an enigmatic and mysterious woman with secrets to share.
What follows is utter nonsense, with Ebert quickly figuring out that the aforementioned woman, Jane March’s Rose, “is there simply to give him a partner in the sex scenes, or she is somehow involved with the mystery of the murder,” as if the same trope hadn’t been seen and done a thousand times already.
As for Willis? He had a full-frontal nude scene removed by the MPAA before the film made it to cinemas, and Ebert wondered why it had been left out. Or, as he put it, “The best possible argument for including Willis’ genitals would have been that the movie, after all, contains everything else,” which is a sentence that had never been uttered before or since.
By the time the credits rolled on Color of Night, he couldn’t believe what he’d just seen. “I was, frankly, stupefied,” the critic shared. “To call it absurd would be missing the point, since any shred of credibility was obviously the first thing thrown overboard.”
It wasn’t even so bad that it became an unintentional comedy, either; it was just rubbish from start to finish.
