The Mildly Over-Achieving 1991 Basic Instinct Knockoff Raw Heat Is Distinguished Largely by the Presence of James Fucking Bond as Its Male Lead
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.
James Bond is such an iconic role that if an actor plays the legendary misogynist for even a single motion picture, as George Lazenby did in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service then that performance defines their career to the extent that no matter who they might go on to play, or who they might have played before, on some level they will ALWAYS be playing a version of James Bond.
This is true of EVERY actor that has played James Bond, even Sean Connery, who went on to have extraordinary success playing very different characters who were, nevertheless, also James Bond on a very real level. It didn’t matter how crazy the movie, Connery always sort of played James Bond.
In Darby O’Gill and the Little People he played an excessively Irish, leprechaun-adjacent young James Bond type. In Zardoz he was a crazy allegorical science-fiction James Bond. In The Untouchables he was a badass Chicago cop James Bond. In his final role in the impossibly awful CGI Cartoon Guardian of the Highlands Connery was a skateboarding, animal-saving, highlands-guarding old-ass embarrassing James Bond.
Pierce Brosnan, Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton in particular have embraced the gift and curse of always being James Bond. In their post-Bond film careers they pivoted joyfully to gleeful self-deprecation. They’ll never be able to escape the outsized shadow of having played one of the most famous characters in film history so they’ve decided to accept what they cannot change.
In the previous Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 entry, on the maddeningly forgettable 1991 Virginia Madsen vehicle Love Kills I desperately hoped that the other television movie erotic thriller Madsen released that year in which she played one third of a love triangle involving a psychiatrist and a possible murderer would be distinctive in a way Love Kills is not.
Raw Heat is, thankfully, infinitely more memorable than Love Kills. That’s because one third of the central love triangle between a shockingly stupid psychiatrist, the troubled, love-sick owner of a book store and a poetry professor who has written multiple books is played by Pierce Brosnan.
That means that motherfucking JAMES BOND is the male lead in a stupid television movie that proved so popular, probably on account of 007’s central involvement, that they added additional sexy scenes and re-issued it on DVD under the title Raw Heat. The movie got such good ratings that they brought back the body doubles and the sexy saxophone score guy for more utterly unnecessary scenes of PG-13 procreation.
Of course Brosnan isn’t technically playing Ian Fleming’s promiscuous racist but rather dark and mysterious professor Paul Tomlinson, but he’s obviously the 007 of sexy academics who seem way too good to be true.
JoBeth Williams stars in Victim of Love as Tess Parker, a strong, smart, successful therapist whose defining characteristics are that she’s incredibly stupid, will believe anything and it takes her a staggeringly long amount of time to figure out things that should be obvious.
One night the unlucky in love shrink meets Paul, a stud with bedroom eyes, a penchant for quoting Edgar Allen Poe and a dead wife he may or may not have murdered. The hunky wordsmith love-bombs the overwhelmed and ecstatic shrink.
Something feels ineffably off about her new beau from the very beginning but she’s too besotted to notice. Tess is so distracted by her new romance that she fails to notice that the man her patient Carla (Madsen) is unhappily obsessed with sounds an awful like her new boyfriend because he is her new boyfriend.
A+ photobomb from Madsen here.
What are the odds? In movies like this, about 75 to 100 percent. It takes fifty minutes before the “Eureka” moment when our clueless heroine realizes that the disreputable rogue her patient won’t stop brooding about is also the ostensible love of her own life.
Victim of Love/Raw Heat benefits from the very low expectations engendered by Madsen’s television work from this era. The moderately over-achieving TV movie distinguishes itself in part by giving Madsen something to do.
This may be pure TV movie hokum but Madsen nevertheless manages to convey genuine angst and sadness. Obsession has blinded Carla to everything in the world but her fixation on Paul and his sins and imperfections, real or imagined. Madsen gives her character a psychological depth and verisimilitude that have everything to do with Madsen’s gifts as an actress and nothing with the ridiculous film she’s stuck in.
Carla tries to warn her therapist that Paul murdered his wife and will murder again but he assures her that he is definitely not a murderer and that’s enough for her. Besides, she’s too busy enjoying the gratuitous sex scenes that were added to the film to make it more appealing to perverts and voyeurs, some of which involve ice in ways that are supposed to be erotic but just seems uncomfortable to notice any red flags.
Williams is sabotaged by playing a gullible dope of a hapless rube but Brosnan delivers a real star turn. People’s 2001 choice for the Sexiest Man Alive cranks up the charm and glamour to 11 playing a man who is way too hot NOT to be some manner of murderous psychopath.
Victim of Love might not be more than a tacky small screen Basic Instinct knockoff but compared to the Madsen TV movie thriller I just suffered through it’s a goddamn blast of vulgar, lurid fun with very entertaining performances from Brosnan and Madsen.
Victim of Love/Raw Heat has got JAMES FREAKING BOND in it. That alone elevates it beyond Madsen’s TV fare from this era with the exception of Gotham, which has a wonderfully idiotic plot involving ghost-fucking AND a lead performance by Two Face, AJKA Tommy Lee Jones, possibly the only character in film history MORE iconic than James Bond.
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