The 2001 Erotic Thriller Lying in Wait is Wonderfully, Unexpectedly Bonkers
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the site and career-sustaining column where I give YOU, the ferociously sexy, intimidatingly brilliant 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. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for each additional selection.
I’m almost obscenely grateful for Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 pledges. Without them, this website would struggle even more. I am particularly appreciative of patrons who choose to pay me to write about the complete filmography of a director, actor or actress or the complete run of a television show like Freakazoid! and Batman Beyond.
But I can’t help but suspect that one of the many reasons this site never becomes more popular or lucrative no matter how desperately I try to mix things up is because I regularly write about shit that nobody cares about other than the patron who commissioned it.
This is going to sound crazy, but I can’t help but wonder if part of the reason this site never became successful or increased rather than decreased in popularity is because I am masochistically, counter-productively devoted to being non-commercial and weird.
Instead of engaging with the films of the day I have devoted considerable time, energy and space to exhaustive explorations of the tumultuous lives and careers of Tawny Kitaen and Rebecca Gayheart. In a perhaps related development, nobody, but nobody, reads this site other than the 12 wonderful souls—I call them the cyber-apostles—who read the Happy Place and comment constantly.
I am currently deep into a similar trek through the complete filmography of Virginia Madsen, a wonderful actress who has made a LOT of movies. A whole lot! And I’m grateful that she did because I can continue this journey for YEARS but I will be the first to concede that Madsen has also a lot of BAD movies.
I should know. I’m watching and writing about Madsen’s life’s work and it contains a lot of stinkers utterly unworthy of the Sideways actress’ extraordinary talent and beauty.
On the surface, 2001’s Lying in Wait looks awfully similar to the string of erotic thrillers Madsen made for television and film in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Only Madsen is now the sexy, cultured older woman with a sexy whiskey rasp instead of the femme fatale.
Lying in Wait distinguishes itself from Madsen’s many other erotic thrillers by virtue of being absolutely bonkers. Lying in Wait only seems generic. In actuality it’s crazier than a shit house rat (those rats get pretty crazy being in the shit house all day!) and nuttier than a squirrel’s diet.
The early oughts shocker casts Thomas Newton as the memorably named Babee Gordon. He’s the son of a famous actress who died tragically under mysterious circumstances as well as an artist whose life is shaken up when Keith (Rutger Hauer) and Vera (Virginia Madsen) move in next door.
Keith used to work in film before trading it for a gambler’s life but what he really likes to do is make people uncomfortable by being a big old pervert and also hauling out his accordion whenever the mood strikes him.
The libertine takes out his squeeze box so he can make music for Babee’s sexy, lithe girlfriend El (Vanessa Dorman) to dance to. Hauer’s anti-hero is a flagrant womanizer who cheats on his gorgeous wife with mystery woman Lois (Shannon Whirry) and proposes swapping partners with his intrigued and appalled new next door neighbor.
In a trademark act of mindless self-destruction Keith drunkenly crashes his car and ends up in a vegetative state. At this point all that Keith has done for his next door neighbor is flirt shamelessly with his girlfriend and “jokingly” propose that they engage in a little old fashioned partner-swapping.
Yet Babee inexplicably devotes his life to caring for Keith. This is true even after Keith, who only talks in Babee’s presence, and never when anyone else is around, not unlike Mr. Ed, murders Lois.
Keith kills his mistress by driving a motorized scooter into her with such tremendous force that it knocks her off her feet, out of the balcony and onto the street below. Hauer’s hammy anti-hero seems to move about five miles an hour in his Rascal. I’m not sure how that could provide enough force to knock another adult over, let alone off a balcony and to their violent death.
The filmmakers don’t make it any more plausible by cutting directly from Keith moving slowly towards Lois with a look of bleary determination to Lois’ bloody corpse. The cut is unintentionally comic. That applies to much of the rest of the film as well.
At worst, Lying in Wait is standard issue Cinemax at Night fodder. At best it suggests the surreal lunacy of Color of Night.
Babee really should turn in his friend for the murder he committed in front of him. But he does not do that. Instead he becomes this strange man’s keeper and protector as well as the instrument of his curious will.
To the rest of the world Keith can’t talk or walk and just seems to be existing. Only Babee knows that his mind is operating just fine and that he is merely pretending to be mute.
You’d think that being in a scooter would seriously hurt Keith’s ability to murder people but he proves otherwise by murdering an agent shortly after the agent tells Babee that nobody is interested in his art, only that of his mother because she’s a dead television star.
Lying in Wait is ostentatious and unabashed in its stupidity. It starts silly and gets increasingly ridiculous until the only reasonable response is an endless series of eye rolls and a grudging appreciation for just how far the film is willing to go.
Babee’s decision to play Renfield to Hauer’s Count Dracula is even more perplexing given his understandable sexual attraction to the older man’s sexy wife.
Madsen does here what she has done over and over again over the course of her career and this project: inject a ragingly, insultingly phony, preposterous bit of schlock with at least an element of truth and professionalism.
Lying in Wait is ragingly phony and dumb but Madsen at least makes you believe in the reality of her character. The film is never more convincing than when Madsen’s weary survivor is smoking a cigarette (the woman has done wonders with cancer sticks as props) and trying to make sense of a world that seems unfathomably complicated and difficult to understand.
Stop reading now in case you don’t want the ending spoiled but we both know there is no chance you’re going to watch this ridiculous movie if you don’t have to.
So it turns out that the reason that Babee’s actions make no sense and seem to be the work of a crazy person is because Babee IS crazy.
It turns out that Keith has actually been in a vegetative state all along. Babee has actually done all of the killing, and that includes his own mother as well. Babee strangles Vera before being shot by El, who reveals that she’s known about Babee’s secret life as a prolific murderer and madman all along.
If that sounds crazy, it is! Lying in Wait is not a good movie but I was legitimately impressed by its lunacy. It’s egregiously awful but it’s also so bad that it’s good, or at least a whole lot of guilty fun.
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