Okay, bad news first: When Will I Be Loved is another intolerable, nearly unwatchable piece of pretentious trash from director James Toback. The good news is that you don’t have to watch past the opening credits to catch Neve Campbell‘s much-celebrated shower scene in which the Scream beauty shows off what for whatever reason she was unwilling to show off in Wild Things when she got busy with both Denise Richards and Matt Dillon at the same time. She’s not going to give it all up, though — a Party of Five girl knows her limitations as she stays facing the bathroom wall, giving us a look at only her back and side as Toback’s camera lovingly (or is it voyeuristically?) sways back and forth. The final shot before she gets dressed has her pleasuring herself with the shower nozzle — Toback, of course, knows that a woman can’t ever take a shower without masturbating. The fact that people still give money to this guy so he can shoot his sexual fantasies disguised as “art films” means that… well, it means that he’ll keep making them, and we’ll keep watching them.
You don’t have to watch too far past the opening credits to get to the shower scene in Dressed to Kill, either, though Brian De Palma’s psychosexual thriller is actually pretty good if you feel like, you know, watching the whole thing. The film opens with a daydream rape fantasy (oh, Brian) in which bored housewife Angie Dickinson (whose makeup stays on perfectly throughout the scene — hey, it’s a fantasy, after all) makes herself feel good as she watches a guy silently shave himself with a straight razor — as her self-caresses get more intense, the steam from the shower fills the room, after which a second guy suddenly appears behind her and grabs her. We’re then jolted out of this fantasy with a hard cut to reality, where we see this beyond sexually frustrated housewife getting stoically and silently banged by her husband before it’s time to get up and get ready to go to someone’s birthday party. Going back to the shower scene, just FYI – the face is Angie’s, though the body belongs to Penthouse model Victoria Lynn; the backlash De Palma received for this stunt inspired one of this later ’80s films, Body Double.
Angelina Jolie may now be one of the richest and most powerful women on the planet, but back in the ’90s, she was a crazy tattooed chick who kept a vial of her own blood around her neck and got naked in movies a lot. Young Angelina was fascinating, dangerous and so sexy it was almost unbearable (remember Gia?); this full-lipped, batshit-insane uber-vixen could make even some of the most wretched movies of the ’90s — such as Mojave Moon — at least somewhat watchable with her very presence. Angelina shares a passionate hotel lobby kiss with Danny Aiello (of all people) within the first ten minutes of this silly desert road movie; the scene you really want to know about comes at about 51 minutes in, where she calls for Aiello to give her some shampoo because she “doesn’t want to wash her hair with soap” (well, who would?) — and, oh dear lord, there’s 21-ish-year-old Angelina Jolie taking a shower. It’s brief, and it could stand for a close-up insert (or seven), but it’s quite glorious nonetheless — there she is, just a hot up-and-coming young actress, before all of the adoptions and political crusades and billions of dollars and Brad Pitt.
Vampyres, also known as Daughters of Dracula, gets right down to business with a lesbian sex scene between Marianne Morris and Anulka Dziubinska (here credited simply as “Anulka”) even before there’s any opening credits, immediately giving a taste of what’s to come (heh heh) in this shameless and silly erotic cult classic. The “plot” involves two hot vampire girls who lure victims into their English estate for orgies of sex and blood; the wet stuff arrives at about 44 minutes in, when one of the ladies warns the other, “You’re playing a dangerous game — kill him before it’s too late — kill him, kill him!” before they indulge in hot shower ecstasy with each other. The sound design is especially impressive in this sequence… actually, strike that, you won’t even notice the sound design — you’ll only have eyes, ears and everything else for the two naked vampire girls going at it. The tagline says it all: “They shared the pleasures of the flesh and the horrors of the grave!” Yes, they did… and now you can, too.
Gene Wilder is deaf, Richard Pryor is blind, and wackiness ensues in this not-bad comedy that reunites the Stir Crazy and Silver Streak duo. However, the real reason to watch this silliness is the mega-hot Joan Severance as the film’s ultra-sexy femme fatale and co-villain (next to an astonishingly young-looking Kevin Spacey — it is only 1989, after all). Joan’s shower scene happens at about the 01:08 mark, in which the soap in her eyes doesn’t allow her to see Wilder in the hotel bathroom with her, looking to steal something out of her bag. The two engage in a sight gag (so to speak) involving Severance blindly reaching for something and Wilder needing to kind of guide the bag into her hands — Joan’s incredible naked body pretty much upstages any and all hilarious comedy shenanigans going on, though. Wilder later pretends to have a gun in his pocket and tells Joan to put her hands in the air, causing her towel to fall to the floor and reveal the goods (to Wilder, not us, unfortunately). “You’re good, you’re real good,” he tells her. That she is.
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Best Of Netflix: Obscure Shower Scenes, Vol. 1