Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #208 Dead Tides (1996)

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. I also recently began a series chronicling the films of bad boy auteur Oliver Stone. 

We as a culture have an unconscionable way of angrily demanding that famous beauties remain young and gorgeous and perfect forever, then judging them harshly for taking concrete measures to do just that. 

Legendary sex symbols like Tawny Kitaen are put in an impossible position: if they attempt to age naturally then we’re reminded of time’s inexorable march every time we see them beyond their impossibly perfect prime. 

But if they get get cosmetic surgery that looks artificial and obvious the way cosmetic surgery almost invariably does, then they are mocked and ridiculed and derided as desperate has beens in supermarket tabloid headlines and sleazy clickbait charticles. 

There are many sad elements of Tawny Kitaen’s life and career. One of them is that one of her final television appearances was on Botched, a reality show devoted to failed cosmetic surgery. 

The aging process is tough on everyone but when you’re a world class class beauty like Kitaen was it’s downright cruel. By the time the “Rowdy” Roddy Piper vehicle Dead Tides washed ashore on undiscriminating video store shelves in 1996 Kitaen been in the public spotlight for over a decade and was approaching middle age. 

Kitaen was no longer the image of freshly scrubbed California ebullience, nor did she exude girl next door innocence the way she once did. 

The video vixen found herself playing femme fatales, dangerous, ferociously sexual women who had experienced life in all its darkness, sweetness and complexity and weren’t shy about using their natural gifts to get what they want. 

Kitaen plays such a character in Dead Tides. She’s Nola, the trophy wife of evil Mexican drug lord Juan (Juan Fernandez) as well as a partner who helps hubby with the dirty family business by transporting drugs and money on her husband’s behalf. 

It is through this sideline that Nola meets Mick Leddy (Roddy Piper). Leddy is a man’s man as well as a lady’s man with an appropriately rugged resume involving the Navy S.E.A.Ls and the Coast Guard. 

The restless hunk with the Sears wardrobe of dad jeans and denim shirts is a good man who comes home from an extended sojourn at sea to discover that his longtime girlfriend Lori (Camilla More) has been having an affair with Scott (Trevor Goddard), his longtime rival and a Coast Guard officer. 

At first it seems like Lori is on hand solely for the sake of one of those singularly unsatisfying erotic thriller sex scenes that are all soft-focus shots of arms and legs sensually intertwined in a manner so aggressively de-contextualized that any sense that the people whose anatomy are on display are, in fact, Mick and Lori and not anonymous, poorly compensated body doubles, disappears. 

ALL of the sex scenes in Dead Tides are like that, especially the ones involving Piper and Kitaen. Piper, alas, never seems to be the one actually laying pipe, and the sex kitten he’s making love to in a maddeningly abstract fashion similarly never seems to be the sexy Kitaen. 

You had me at “Exclusive Posterbag”

Dead Tides is yet another erotic thriller utterly devoid of eroticism and thrills but it’s also a half-assed macho action movie as well. It’s two, two, two forgettable genre movies in one groaning little nothing. 

It turns out that Lori isn’t just here for a little T&A; she’s also the center of a love triangle begging for the cutting room floor that nevertheless occupies way too much screen time, although to be fair, it’s not as if the main plot has anything to offer either. 

Nola offers Mick good money to drive a boat down to Mexico for her sneeringly evil spouse and he reluctantly agrees. In Mexico Juan makes an indelible impression on Mick by killing a dude in front of him and generally being a huge dick as well as a murderous drug kingpin. 

Yet when Nola accompanies Mick on a drug run the ex-S.E.A.L with the grappler’s physique can’t resist temptation and has sorry soft-core sex with the jealous and psychotic drug lord’s wife. Not a good idea!

he seems nice!

For a man whose professional moniker was “Rowdy”, Piper gives a surprisingly restrained performance here. Without wrestling shtick or bag pipes or a finely crafted persona to fall back on he’s surprisingly soft-spoken, even gentle at times. Women are attracted to his veteran sea-hand here because he’s a stud who looks much better with his shirt off than on but also because he seems like a genuinely nice guy, in sharp opposition to all of the other men in the movie, who are so aggressive and macho that they make RODDY PIPER seem as effete as Truman Capote. 

The feds are onto Juan, however, so they convince Mick to pull a Reverse Snow and turn informer. This causes a rift in his relationship with Nola and leads to a third act shift from generic erotic thriller to painfully arbitrary action schlock. 

Piper finally gets to put the hurt on poorly differentiated Mexican henchmen in a flurry of shootouts and explosions that never come close to justifying this flimsy bit of claptrap’s existence. 

Dead Tides isn’t much of anything, I’m afraid. It exists to fill up video store shelve space and late night pay cable schedules. It’s product, not art or even entertainment. If this was the quality of film Kitaen was being offered at this point in her career I’m not surprised that in the years ahead when Kitaen appeared in movies or television shows it was generally in cameos as herself. 

Kitaen had a magnetic personality. She had beauty and charm and an irresistible zest for life that made her a natural star. The roles she played as an actress couldn’t compare to the real Kitaen. 

That’s why Kitaen was eulogized as a legendary sex symbol and the girl in the Whitesnake videos more than as an actress in movies like Dead Tides. Like so many of her vehicles, Dead Tides didn’t know what to do with Kitaen but it didn’t know how to do anything else either, really, beyond limply execute direct-to-video formula with little energy and even less inspiration.

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