Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #174 White Hot (1989)

Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.

Or you can be like three kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m deep into a project on the films of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I have now watched and written about every movie Sam Peckinpah made over the course of his tumultuous, wildly melodramatic psychodrama of a life and career.  

This generous patron is now paying for me to watch and write about the cult animated show Batman Beyond and I also recently began even more screamingly essential deep dives into the complete filmographies of troubled video vixen Tawny Kitaen and troubled former Noxzema pitch-woman Rebecca Gayheart.

It’s a testament to how far and quickly Kitaen’s career fell from the relative heights of Bachelor Party that some of her Reagan-era efforts are only available on VHS. Recent Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry Marine Issue was one such obscurity, as is 1989’s White Hot. 

Like Marine Issue, I’ve been low-key mesmerized by the video box for White Hot since I first encountered it as a teenage movie addict with an insatiable curiosity about which movies had naked boobs in them and later as a video store clerk.

An eternal truth of the poster and video boxes of pulpy b-movies is that they’re never, ever as lurid or insane or outrageous as they look. White Hot might just be the exception that proves the rule. 

Looking at the video box after having seen the film, I’m similarly struck by how incredibly misleading the poster is. It looks for all the world like a sassy buddy cop comedy about a slick, by the book lawyer and a maverick cop who plays by her own rules who team up to take down the giant, floating, disembodied head of Danny Aiello.

Instead White Hot is about two addicts smoking crack, selling crack and occasionally exchanging sexual favors for drugs.

I was blown away by just how sleazy White Hot is. There are snuff films of baby animals being brutally murdered with more class than White Hot.

It boggles the mind that a mere two years after he angrily glared, thrusted and scowled his way through a shockingly prolonged crack-fueled, oiled-up hate-fuck scene where his crack-addicted crack dealer has degrading sex with the girlfriend of his supplier in revenge for his girlfriend trading sex for crack Robby Benson achieved cinematic mortality as the voice of the Beast in Beauty and the Beast. 

Benson has pretty much been able to eat off that iconic role for the last three decades. It’s a good thing social media wasn’t around in the early 1990s or a moralistic busybody would alert Disney to the existence of a crack-fueled sex scene featuring the lead voice in one of their biggest upcoming movies, a surefire family classic. Suddenly, Benson wouldn’t be allowed to visit Disney Land or even watch Disney movies, let alone be the lead voice in an all-time animated treasure. 

When he made White Hot Benson was still trying unsuccessfully to establish himself as an adult movie star after enjoying tremendous success as the boyishly handsome teen star of iconic movies like Ode to Billy Joe, Ice Castles and The Chosen. 

We’ve previously explored another doomed attempt by Benson to make it as a grown-up lead in the ferociously forgettable 1985 TV movie California Girls, which similarly cast Benson opposite Kitaen but otherwise could not be more different than White Hot.  

For starters, because of censorship, television movies in the 1980s couldn’t show much in the way of crack orgies. That’s not a problem for hard R-rated b-movies, however, and White Hot takes full advantage of that intoxicating freedom. 

In a performance that took a blowtorch to his teenybopper idol persona, Benson, who also directs, stars as Scott, a cash-strapped young professional with some very terrible neighbors, most notably Butchie (Kevin Gray), a dead-eyed sociopath in the Patrick Bateman mold who really seems to get off on the whole “destroying lives and families” aspect of being a crack dealer. 

Butchie could not be more Satanic if he had horns, a tale, reeked of brimstone and had a longstanding beef with God.

The sneering heavy has to leave town for a while so he offers Scott a Faustian bargain. The embodiment of pure evil asks a dude who previously only did cocaine at parties and for special occasions if he’d like to join him in the business of selling “very popular consumer goods.”

Before a confused Scott can wrongly assume he wants him to sell video game systems or pagers Butchie helpfully specifies that he’s talking about hard drugs. He makes Scott a tempting offer: if he takes over his crack dealing operation for a week or two he’ll make enough money to pay off all his debts and then some. 

PLUS he’ll have a great story for the kids. Whenever they’d razz him for being a straight-laced old-timer he could wow them with the corny old story about how he solved all of his money problems permanently by becoming a full-time crack dealer for a week or two. 

Butchie makes selling crack seem like the single most evil endeavor in the history of the universe. Scott is reluctant to make the big plunge but Butchie convinces him with some bogus moral equivalence. After all, in a crazy, mixed-up world where politicians tell lies, movie stars cheat on their spouses and commercials make unrealistic claims does anyone really have the authority to definitively state that selling crack to children is bad? 

Scott thinks he’ll be able to gingerly dip a toe into hardcore criminality before returning to the straight life but his plans are complicated by gorgeous girlfriend Vanessa’s (Kitaen) weakness for cocaine, crack’s rich uncle. 

While cooking up crack with Butchie’s flirtatious girlfriend one afternoon Scott takes a hit of his product. That’s all it takes. His eyes water. He’s overpowered and overwhelmed. He sports the expression of a man who has just been kicked in the dick by God over and over again, but in a good way. 

Scott soon begins getting high on his own supply. There’s an accidentally hilarious scene where Vanessa, with wonderfully misplaced outrage and judgment, tells Scott that he needs to stop selling crack because it is illegal, despite being very much into the similarly illegal practice of using cocaine. 

Once Vanessa takes that fateful first hit of crack cocaine it’s all over for her as well. She’s so powerfully addicted that she eventually succumbs to offers to trade sex for crack. 

The ne’er do well who pressures Vanessa into selling herself for a fix is ostensibly Scott’s best friend but at the risk of coming off as a prude with a hopelessly old-fashioned sense of morals, if someone gets you into the crack game so they can coerce your girlfriend into trading her body for a hit they’re not your real friend, and you don’t need them in your life. Real friends make you feel good about yourself. They don’t manipulate you into becoming an amoral, crack-addicted monster so they can have sex with your girlfriend.

Scott deals, poorly, with his best friend and girlfriend’s crack-fueled hook-up by smoking more crack, dealing more crack and having sex with other people. Vanessa, meanwhile, deals with Scott’s moodiness and resentment by also smoking more crack and having sex with other people, including two random dudes at a coke and crack-themed soiree. 

Things get very ugly very quickly. The couple hits bottom, then they hit another bottom, then they hit a bottom so low they never imagined it possible. 

Needless to say, White Hot did not establish Benson as either as a cinematic auteur or as a heavyweight dramatic actor but he’s sweatily convincing as a man who has lost his moral compass and sense of self to addiction. 

Kitaen, who famously wrestled cocaine addiction in real life, is similarly convincing as a woman powerless before her compulsions. White Hot is a bizarre, vulgar mess of a movie that starts out sleazy and just keeps getting progressively more lurid.

There is a zero percent chance any of you will watch White Hot on a VCR so I do not feel bad about giving away an ending where our hero/anti-hero/villain and a friend terrorize Butchie by forcing him to do so many drugs that it induces a fatal overdose.

White Hot is brazen and bizarre as well as unrelentingly, surreally lurid. Danny Aiello figures very prominently early in the film as a mob kingpin, only to mysteriously disappear for long stretches, only to return just as mysteriously and randomly.

It’s as if Aiello realized, early in the process of making White Hot that he’d already starred in Moonstruck, and would be making Do the Right Thing soon, and consequently was a real actor way too good for trash like White Hot and asked that his role be dramatically trimmed. 

In perhaps the single most bizarre sequence in a film overflowing with contenders, including a scene where a dude gets shot in the dick, Robocop-style, Aiello’s mobster “auditions” singers for the Broadway show he’s ostensibly producing for the sake of making sexy woman perform for his amusement and the first candidate is Judy Tenuta basically playing herself, complete with accordion accompaniment. 

For three unhinged minutes a nearly X-rated sleaze fest from the voice of Beast unexpectedly but delightfully becomes a showcase for the musical comedy stylings of Judy Tenuta. And you know what? It fucking works! Tenuta is just doing her routine but she’s inherently funny and it’s utterly fascinating seeing Danny Aiello respond, in character, to Judy Tenuta’s aggressively oddball essence. Aiello is a great actor and Tenuta is a force of nature as a comic performer so it’s surreal seeing them each do what they do brilliantly in a scene with no place whatsoever in a movie like this. 

At its best White Hot feels like a grindhouse/direct-to-video take on the neon debauchery and noir style of Michael Mann. It’s aided immeasurably by a terrific score by a wildly overqualified Niles Rodgers that gives the film a texture, grit and seductiveness it would otherwise lack. 

Benson didn’t have much of a career in film in front of the camera or behind it as an adult. He did, however, segue successfully into a career as a prolific, regularly employed television director. That makes sense. 

White Hot is many things but it’s never boring. Besides, if you can direct yourself naked and covered in oil having cracked-up sex with a crack-dealing contemporary then directing an episode of Friends with fully clothed actors shouldn’t present too much of a challenge. 

Help ensure a future for the Happy Place during an uncertain era AND get sweet merch by pledging to the site’s Patreon account at https://www.patreon.com/nathanrabinshappyplace

Also, BUY the RIDICULOUSLY SELF-INDULGENT, ILL-ADVISED VANITY EDITION of  THE WEIRD ACCORDION TO AL, the Happy Place’s first book. This 500 page extended edition features an introduction from Al himself (who I co-wrote 2012’s Weird Al: The Book with), who also copy-edited and fact-checked, as well as over 80 illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro on entries covering every facet of Al’s career, including his complete discography, The Compleat Al, UHF, the 2018 tour that gives the book its subtitle and EVERY episode of The Weird Al Show and Al’s season as the band-leader on Comedy Bang! Bang! 

Only 23 dollars signed, tax and shipping included, at the https://www.nathanrabin.com/shop or for more, unsigned, from Amazon here