A wealthy family takes in, and is taken in by, a pretty teenage girl in 1992's Poison Ivy. Drew Barrymore made a splash with this box office bomb that nonetheless enjoyed some longevity on home video. It's a shallow, glossy noir pastiche that's occasionally enjoyable schlock.
Sara Gilbert plays Sylvie, a nerdy rich kid who watches Ivy (Barrymore) on a rope swing, dreaming of what it would be like to be "skanjy"--this movie's term for skanky or slutty.
Before you know it, Ivy has taken Sylvie under her wing and has beguiled Sylvie's wealthy parents into letting her move in. Sylvie's parents are played by Cheryl Ladd and Tom Skerritt and I have to say Skerritt is skanjier than anyone else in this movie. He plays a local news anchor given to high handed editorials which his daughter despises. Normally the dad in this kind of movie makes some effort to resist the hot tomato on his radar but from the moment Skerritt lays eyes on Ivy he looks like he wants to shtup her.
He's so pathetically horny, it's kind of hilarious. His wife has a terminal illness and there's a scene where Ivy seduces him right on his wife's sickbed while his wife is sleeping in it and, sure, there's some astonishing audacity on Ivy's part but mostly I was thinking what a callow weakling this guy is. Have some respect for your wife, dude, and just go masturbate somewhere.
Barrymore is delectable in this movie but her character's a two dimensional echo of greater femmes fatale before her. She and Sara Gilbert have good chemistry I wish the movie had made better use of.
A friend here in Japan lent me this movie on DVD so I discovered the film's title in Japan is "Body Heat". That's not a translation from the Japanese words for Body and Heat. It's literally the English words "Body Heat" written in katakana. Meanwhile, Lawrence Kasdan's famous 1981 film, Body Heat, is known as Shiroi dress no onna, or "White dress woman". It's like someone in charge of distributing Poison Ivy in Japan had long rued the lost opportunity to use such a great title. I wonder if there's some other, mid-2000s movie, being sold as Poison Ivy. Poison Ivy wishes it were as good as Body Heat.
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