Crimes of Passion

First and foremost, an extremely uninhibited satire on American sexual dreams and nightmares. Turner, a career woman who doubles by night as the ultra-hooker China Blue, acts out every male fantasy in the book until she picks up a cop, sees him turn into a piece of meat beneath her, and gets carried away with her stiletto heels and his nightstick. She meets her Baudelairean match in Perkins, a deranged fundamentalist consumed by lust and slowly mustering the energy to act out his own dark fantasies. In between, the film lays into an 'average' suburban couple, living a sexual fantasy of their own - of marital fulfilment. It relies on sheer pace and stylistic bravura, and talks dirty more wittily than anything since Bogart and Bacall. There are lapses, but this is in the main a comedy so black that it recaptures some of the cinema's long-lost power to shock.