Here's what Tuna wrote, so I don't have to repeat it:
"The Seduction (1982) is an early stalker movie. Morgan Fairchild is a
prominent news anchor, and a photographer decides he loves her, and she must
also love him. It starts with him spying on her with long telephoto lenses,
then he becomes bold enough to contact her. At this point in history, there
were no stalking laws, and the police could do nothing. Eventually, it is up
to her to bring him down.
Morgan Fairchild shows everything, albeit briefly in several nude scenes.
IMDb readers say 4.2. There isn't much wrong with the story, although a
few plot points are hard to swallow, but the acting was uniformly bad, even
earning three Razzie nominations. In fact, some of the line delivery was so
bad, I suspect the director was not even there for the filming. Morgan did
look very good, and the premise was new in 1982, but now it is just another
badly acted movie. D+."
Everything he said there is fair, but I have probably watched this film ten
times. I think I wore out a VHS video that I recorded off HBO. Back in
those days the pause button didn't really work that well, and a paused image
would usually get some distortion.
What was all the fuss about? Morgan Fairchild naked.
She was at that time just about the biggest TV star in the world from her
starring role on Flamingo Road, and she was a goddess, with a spectacular
figure and an unearthly flawless face like a young Deneuve. She had
never been seen naked in public before this film. In fact, she had never even
been in a film, naked or clothed, so this was the 1982 equivalent to Katie
Holmes taking off her shirt in The Gift, except you have to imagine Katie
having a much prettier face, being a much bigger star, never having been in
any previous movies, and removing her panties briefly. That was hot.
The film itself was sort of a half-A, half-B hybrid.
On the "A" side of the ledger, it has some magnificent cinematography, and
a score composed by an Oscar winner. In addition, the production values look
rich, stalking was a hot button topic, and Morgan Fairchild was in
demand. The producers were trying to put together a package like Body
Heat - eroticism in a slick package without too much explicit nudity.
Tuna summarized the film's failings. Lacking the scripting of Lawrence Kasdan and the acting chops of Hurt and Turner, it was no Body Heat. The
acting can be dreadful, led by Dr. Ben Casey as a cop and Michael Sarrazin as
Morgan Fairchild's boyfriend. The Razzies singled out Fairchild and her
character's gal-pal played by Colleen Camp, but those two seemed like Dench
clones compared to Sarrazin and Edwards. How bad is a movie when Andrew
Stevens has all the acting chops? And some of the film's logic is
preposterous. When the evil stalker kills the boyfriend in the hot tub (in
Fairchild's arms), he drags the man's body off to the hills to bury him,
leaving Fairchild free to go inside and call the police, or even to get
dressed and leave completely. She manages to do neither of those things, and I
guess you might believe that she was in shock, but you can't believe that he
could anticipate that. From his point of view, he murders a guy in front of
his girlfriend, then wanders off for an hour or more to bury the guy with a
little shovel, thus leaving the witness unattended.
Except for the last ten minutes of the film, absolutely nothing happens.
The plot is so paper-thin that the film had to be padded out to feature length
by scenes of Ms. Fairchild swimming, bathing, preening, hot-tubbing, etc. The
visceral impact of the only action (the boyfriend's murder) is immediately
nullified by the confusing and seemingly interminable burial. One must admit
that the last ten minutes, the actual face-to-face confrontation between
stalker and stalkee, are actually quite entertaining in an over-the-top way.
She manages to defeat him by coming on to him in a really trashy, aggressive
way. Once he loses the power in the relationship, his hard-on deflates! Before
the credits roll, there is Morgan Fairchild saying "fuck me," and there is
Morgan blasting away at the guy with a high-powered rifle, blowing out windows
and generally wreaking havoc in her house. That was all fun, but it just took
too long to get there, with nothing for the viewer to do along the way but try
to get a decent glimpse of Morgan Fairchild's flesh.
Which I certainly did plenty of in the early 80s, as bad as the film was.
Tuna nailed the collages last week, so I just hit the highlights and made a
zipped .wmv of the three
major nude scenes.